Karina Tachihara

Karina Tachihara is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois. Her research focuses on cognitive mechanisms in language learning, particularly how adults acquire unacceptability judgments and how semantic knowledge structures language production.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Psychology, Princeton University (2022)
• B.A. in Psychology and Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley (2014)

Her work combines psycholinguistic experiments (acceptability judgments, production tasks) with computational methods like machine learning and large language models. Current projects analyze input structure, modality effects, and cross-linguistic differences in Japanese, English, and Spanish. She aims to expand to Hindi and other languages.

Recent publications examine statistical preemption in adult learners, incremental clustering in scene descriptions, and lexical associations across native/non-native language pairs. Her research often involves interdisciplinary collaborations across psychology, linguistics, and computer science.