My research has focused on the effect of prosody on the comprehension of speech in a natural discourse context, and when and how children learn to use prosodic prominence to comprehend contrast.

    I have conducted a series of eye-tracking experiments to investigate these issues in English and Japanese. I am also interested in the brain function underlying the integration of prosodic information during a discourse, and am running a set of ERP experiments to examine the electro-physiological responses to contrast-marking pitch prominence in dialogues in English and Japanese.

    My additional interests include topics such as lexical prosody and word recognition, phrasal or boundary pitch movements and their pragmatic function, and cross-linguistic differences in the use of intonation for expressing various illocutionary forces, affects and the informational status of words. My recent work on topics other than prosody includes the eye-tracking study investigating the effect of visual sociolinguistic cues on dialectal speech perception and the perception study on individual differences in sensitivity to sub-phonemic variation.

• Children's interpretation of contrast-evoking accent.
  Ito, K., Bibyk, S. A., Wagner, L., & Speer, S. R. (submitted for publication).
  

• Intonation facilitates contrast resolution: Evidence from Japanese adults & 6-year olds.
  Ito, K., Jincho, N., Minai, U., Yamane, N., & Mazuka, R. (in press).
  Journal of Memory and Language.

• Interactions between syntactic priming and contrastive prosody in Japanese.
  Ito, K., Hirose, Y. & Arai, M. (2011).
  Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody 2, Montreal, Canada.

• Phonological and phonetic properties of contrastive referential expressions in spontaneous dialogue.
  Ito, K. & Speer, S. R. (2011).
  Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody 2, Montreal, Canada.

• Interaction between context-driven salience and prosody during referential resolution.
  Ito, K., Nakamura, C. & Mazuka, R. (2011).
  Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody 2, Montreal, Canada.

• Prosodic properties of contrastive information in spontaneous productions.
  Shari, S. R. & Ito, K. (2011).
  The 17th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, Paris, France.

• Facilitatory and interfering interactions between contrastive prosody and syntactic priming.
  Hirose, Y., Arai, M. & Ito, K. (2011).
  The 17th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, Paris, France.

• Speaker-adaptation to /I/-/E/ merger: An eye-tracking study.
  Ito, K. & Campbell-Kibler, K. (2011).
  The 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Hong Kong.

• Prosodic properties of contrastive utterances in spontaneous speech.
  Speer, S. R. & Ito, K. (2011).
  The 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Hong Kong.

• Sensitivity to sub-phonemic variation during lexical identification: evidence from visual analogue scale (VAS) goodness-ratings.
  Skorniakova, O. & Ito, K. (2011).
  The 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Hong Kong.

• Do prosodic cues enhance or attenuate an effect of syntactic priming?
  Arai, M., Ito, K. & Hirose, Y. (2011).
  The 24th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Poster presentation.

• Semantically-independent but contextually-dependent interpretation of contrastive accent.
  Ito, K. & Speer, S. R. (2011).
  In Prieto, P., Frota, S., & Elordieta, G. (Eds.) Prosodic categories: production, perception and comprehension. Springer. pp.69-92.

• Order Effects in Production and Comprehension of Prosodic Boundaries.
  Foltz, A. Maday, K. & Ito, K. (2011).
  In Prieto, P., Frota, S., & Elordieta, G. (Eds.) Prosodic categories: production, perception and comprehension. Springer. pp.39-68.

• Discourse-driven awareness of contrast and the effect of pitch accent on referential resolution
  Ito,K.
  Prosody Frontiers. November, 2010. Leiden.

• The interaction between gender and prosodic cues during pronoun resolution
  Collaborator: Pauline Welby, Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Université d'Aix‐Marseille; Shari R. Speer, Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University

• Contrast-marking prosody in European Portuguese
  Collaborator: Sónia Frota, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa Departamento de Linguística Geral e Românica

• Speaker-adaptation to /I/-/E/ vowel merger: An Eye-tracking study
  Collaborator: Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University

• Interaction between visual and linguistic contexts during referential resolution
  

• Effect of pitch prominence on children's discourse representation
  Collaborator: Reiko Mazuka, RIKEN BSI.

• Production of intonational focus in English and Japanese dialogue
  Collaborator: Shari R. Speer, Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University, Columbus.

• Comprehending contrastive accent: A developmental study in American English
  Collaborator: Shari R. Speer (Linguistics), Laura Wagner (Psychology), Sarah Bibyk (Honors Senior, Linguistics).

• A cross-linguistic ERP study on intonational emphasis in discourse
  Collaborator: Language Development Laboratory. Riken Brain Science Institute, Japan. Susan M. Garnsey (Psychology/Beckman Institute), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

• Seminar in Psycholinguistics: Eye-tracking for investigating human speech processing (Ling H871)

• Introduction to Language in the Humanities (Ling H201)

• Language and the Mind (Ling/Psych H371/371)

• Proseminar: Eye tracking research in Psycholinguistics (Ling 795.10)

• Eye tracking methodology. LSA Summer Mini-Institute: 7/14-18, 2008

• Intonation and discourse structures in unscripted conversation (with Speer, S. R.) Invited 1-week tutorial Department of Linguistics, University of Leipzig, Germany, Autumn 2004