Profiles

Professor KOIZUMI Masatoshi

Affiliations :

  • Graduate School Faculty of Arts and Letters
  • Division of Department of Integrated Human Sciences
  • Psychology and Linguistics Course
  • Department of Linguistics

I research language and thinking processes

Since high school I wanted to become a physicist and to find out how the universe worked. Little by little, however, I became convinced that to discover the mechanisms of the universe we must first know how people perceive it – in other words, we must learn more about human cognitive ability (my great turn towards epistemology). I decided that the most effective way to do so would be through the ability unique to humans, that is, through language. Thus I set out to become a linguist (my great turn toward linguistics).
As a child I played baseball every day, but there were two other things I loved just as much: foreign countries and doing experiments. I used to take apart our old tube radio and then put it together again, or contact people from the other side of the planet via a self-made wireless transmitter for fun. My dream was to become a radio officer on a luxury liner and spend my life travelling around the world. Now I travel around carrying test equipment, collecting data for my research on language and thought. Maybe I am simply continuing my favorite activities as a child.

  • Research, History
  • Books, papers, etc.
  • Courses
    Modern Linguistics (General Lecture); Linguistics (Advanced Seminar); Interlinguistics (Seminar); Linguistics Analysis (Advanced Seminar); Sign Language Basics
    Personal History
    B.A., International Christian University; M.A., The Ohio State University; Ph.D. in Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After serving as Lecturer and Associate Professor at Tohoku Gakuin University and as Associate Professor at Tohoku University, he assumed his current position.
    Degree
    Ph.D.
    Field
    Cognitive Neuroscience of Language
    Research Subject
    Pseudo-Dynamic Preservation of Endangered Languages and Elucidation of Neural Processing through a Physiologically Annotated Natural Discourse Corpus
    Keywords
    word order, syntactic structure, sentence processing load, event cognition, Mayan languages, Kaqchikel, Austronesian languages, Truku, Tongan, fMRI, NIRS, EEG, event-related potentials (ERPs), magnetoencephalography (MEG), eye tracking
    Affiliation
    Linguistic Society of Japan, Linguistic Society of America
    Database of Researchers Information
    https://www.r-info.tohoku.ac.jp/ja/21f32d719e7ab40ef963d380bc73c6f1.html
    Website
    https://www2.sal.tohoku.ac.jp/ling/index.html
  • Books
    Constituent Order in Language and Thought. Cambridge University Press.
    Phrase Structure in Minimalist Syntax. Hituzi Syobo.
    Issues in Japanese Psycholinguistics from Comparative Perspectives, Vols. 1–2. De Gruyter Mouton. (Editor)
    『文の構造』研究社(共著)
    『ここから始める言語学プラス統計分析』共立出版(編著)
    Academic Papers
    1. Asami, D., T. Naoe, M. Makuuchi, and M. Koizumi. (2026). Unified Brain Mechanisms Underlying the Processing of Word Order Permutations of Arguments and Adjuncts in Sentences. Human Brain Mapping 47, no. 11.
    2. Emura, R., Kawachi, Y., Sugawara, S., & Koizumi, M. (2025). The lingering effect as memory persistence has distinct predictors from the garden-path effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
    3. Jeong, H., Kim, J., Yano, M., Cui, H., Kiayama, S., & Koizumi, M. (2025). The crucial role of the left inferior frontal gyrus (BA44) in synergizing syntactic structure and information structure during sentence comprehension. Brain and Language, 262, 105533.
    4. Sugimoto, Y., Yoshida, R., Jeong, H., Koizumi, M., Brennan, J. R., & Oseki, Y. (2024). Localizing syntactic composition with left-corner recurrent neural network grammars. Neurobiology of Language, 5(1), 201-224.
    5. Yano, M., Niikuni, K., Shimura, R., Funasaki, N., & Koizumi, M. (2025). Producing non-basic word orders in (in) felicitous contexts: evidence from pupillometry and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 40(1), 1-22.
    6. Tamaoka, K., Yu, S., Zhang, J., Otsuka, Y., Lim, H., Koizumi, M., & Verdonschot, R. G. (2024). Syntactic structures in motion: Investigating word order variations in verb-final (Korean) and verb-initial (Tongan) languages. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1360191.
    7. Koizumi, M., Takeshima, Y., Tachibana, R., Asaoka, R., Saito, G., Niikuni, K., & Gyoba, J. (2020). Cognitive loads and time courses related to word order preference in Kaqchikel sentence production: an NIRS and eye-tracking study. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 35(2), 137-150.
    8. Koizumi, M., & Kim, J. (2016). Greater left inferior frontal activation for SVO than VOS during sentence comprehension in Kaqchikel. Frontiers in psychology, 7, 1541.
    9. Koizumi, M., Yasugi, Y., Tamaoka, K., Kiyama, S., Kim, J., Sian, J. E. A., & Mátzar, L. P. O. G. (2014). On the (non) universality of the preference for subject-object word order in sentence comprehension: A sentence-processing study in Kaqchikel Maya. Language, 90(3), 722-736.
    10. Koizumi, M., & Tamaoka, K. (2010). Psycholinguistic evidence for the VP-internal subject position in Japanese. Linguistic inquiry, 41(4), 663-680.
    Awards
    Leonard Bloomfield Book Award (Linguistic Society of America, 2025)