Ottawa – Carleton Linguistics Professor Masako Hirotani has been appointed as a research associate in the Department of Neuropsychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany.

“Germany’s Max Planck Institutes are highly regarded Centres of Excellence that promote international collaboration on cutting-edge research projects,” says Randall Gess, director of the School of Linguistics and Language Studies. “This appointment is therefore a great tribute to Dr. Hirotani and the School of Linguistics and Language Studies, which is interested in maintaining and promoting Carleton University’s important presence on the international scene.”

During her three-year term, Dr, Hirotani will participate in two projects. The first project concerns the neuroscience behind language processing. The second project will examine the on-line use of speech cues, such as pitch and pauses and the impact of these on language processing. By using some of the latest experimental techniques such as brain imaging and Event Related Potentials which look at brain waves, she hopes to uncover some of the important features of human language processing and their foundations in the human brain.

Dr. Hirotani is an assistant professor of linguistics and a member of the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton. This winter, she is co-teaching a new course The Mysteries of Language with Carleton Professor Ida Toivonen. Some of the mysteries include why language is unique to humans, how children master its complexities so easily, how the brain handles language and how languages are born and die.

“Although we use language every day, we don’t have a chance to stop and think about it,” observes Dr. Hirotani. “We are hoping to structure the course in a way such that students will be taken out for a virtual tour in which they discover and experience eye-opening facts about human language.”

The course will examine interesting questions: If you can say “Pick the book up” and “Pick up the book,” why can you say “Take the elevator up” but not “Take up the elevator? Why is it impossible to look up all the facts about the grammar of a language in a book? Why do teenagers speak differently from their parents?

Dr. Hirotani recently attended and presented a paper at the European Conference on Eye Movements to understand how our eyes move when we read and understand sentences.