Masako Hirotani

Dr. Masako Hirotani is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Carleton University, cross-appointed with the Department of Cognitive Science. She directs the Language and Brain Laboratory and is an adjunct associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience of language, and syntax-phonology interfaces. Key interests include adult sentence processing, auditory information use in language comprehension, and neural correlates of language processing, with recent work on dialectal impacts on education and conversational dynamics.

Education: B.A. (Sophia University), M.A. (University of Tokyo), Ph.D. (University of Massachusetts Amherst). Former postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig, Germany).

Research highlights include studies on dialectal disparities in academic achievement, neural synchronization in conversation, and acoustic properties of speech sounds. She actively contributes to Carleton’s Accessibility Institute and Visualization and Simulation (VSIM) Centre. Awards include the 2018 Favourite Faculty Member nomination and JSPS Invitation Fellowship (2017-2018).

Teaching includes courses on psycholinguistics, child language, and cognitive neuroscience methods. Over 10 grants funded her work, including CUELF (2023-2024) and SSHRC grants. Her lab integrates EEG, fMRI, and behavioral methods to study language-brain interactions.