Yasuhiro Shirai is Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science. His research interests include first and second language acquisition of grammatical constructions, in particular of tense-aspect and relative clauses, and cognitive models of language acquisition and processing.
His publications appeared in Applied Psycholinguistics, Frontiers in Psychology, Journal of Child Language,Journal of Pragmatics, Language, Language Learning, Linguistics, Memory & Cognition, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Studies in Language, among others. He has also (co-)authored and (co-)edited more than ten books/special issues of journals, including The Acquisition of Lexical and Grammatical Aspect (Mouton de Gruyter), Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics: Japanese (Cambridge University Press) and Connectionism and Second Language Acquisition (Routledge). He is Associate Editor of First Language (Sage) and Frontiers in Psychology. Prior to his current appointment, he was Assistant/Associate Professor of linguistics at Cornell University and Professor of linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh.
First Language Acquisition, Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, Tense-aspect, Corpus-Based Research, Usage-based Linguistics