FACULTY

Naho Orita

ORITA, Naho (折田奈甫), Associate Professor

ResearchMap site : https://researchmap.jp/naho_orita

E-mail : [orita@waseda.jp]

I am interested in how Japanese spoken by non-native speakers is perceived by Japanese listeners. Research in Western contexts has shown that a speaker’s race or ethnicity can influence how their speech is understood and evaluated. In Japan, where the number of foreign residents continues to grow, I believe it is essential to uncover these mechanisms of language perception in order to build a fairer society. Using methods from psycholinguistics and natural language processing, I study how both humans and language models perceive Japanese spoken by non-native speakers. Previously, my research focused on first language acquisition and computational modeling of discourse-level speaker behavior. I have long been fascinated by language acquisition and plan to continue pursuing it as a side project alongside my main research described above.

Education

  • Ph.D. in Linguistics, University of Maryland, 2015
  • M.A. in English, Kobe Shoin Women’s University, 2009
  • A.A. in English, Osaka Jogakuin College, 2003

Current CELESE responsibilities

Administrative roles : Program coordinator

Courses : Academic Lecture Comprehension, Communication Strategies, Technical Writing

Research areas and interests

Psycholinguistics

Representative works

  • Orita (2025). "Exploring social priming effects in L1 Japanese speech perception." In Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics.
  • 折田奈甫, 藤井友比呂, 小野創, ノーバート・ホーンスティン (共編著) (2025). 『言語能力は人工知能で解明できるか』. 岩波書店.
  • Orita, Takahashi, and Sakai (2023). "Agreement affects the interpretation of null arguments in semi-artificial Japanese." In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
  • 折田奈甫 (2023). 私のブックマーク: 第一言語獲得から考える人工知能. 人工知能 38(2).
  • Orita (2022). "Computational modeling." Key Concepts of Experimental Pragmatics. (ed.) Miyamoto, Koizumi, Ono, Sauerland, and Yatsushiro.
  • Orita, Vornov, and Feldman (2021). “Informativity, topicality, and speech cost: Comparing models of speakers’ choices of referring expressions”. In Discourse Processes.
  • Orita, Ono, Feldman, and Lidz (2021). “Japanese children’s knowledge of the locality of zibun and kare”. In Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics.

Other

  • 日本学術振興会 基盤研究(C)『海外にルーツを持つマイノリティが話す日本語の音声認識と評価 ー社会心理言語学的研究』研究代表者. 2025-2028.
  • 日本学術振興会 基盤研究(C)『人工言語を用いた項省略の研究』研究代表者. 2020-2023.
  • 日本学術振興会 若手研究『項省略を考慮した日本語の統語的ブートストラッピング』研究代表者. 2018-2019.
  • 日本学術振興会 スタート支援『母語獲得におけるわかりやすい学習事例の解明』研究代表者. 2016-2017.