Rate My Professor Kiwako Ito

Associate Professor Kiwako Ito is an Associate Professor of Linguistics in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, College of Human and Social Futures, at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy and a Master's degree in Linguistics from the University of Illinois. As Director of the Lab for Applied Language Science (LALS), Ito leads psycholinguistic research employing eye-tracking to examine how individuals process prosody—the rhythm, intonation, and melody of speech—and respond to it. Her investigations span language acquisition and processing in typically developing children, school-age children, adolescents, adults, aging populations, second language learners, and clinical groups including those with autism spectrum disorder, hearing impairments, developmental disorders, and dementia. Key research areas include speech perception, grammatical development, joint attention cues, effects of phonetic variability and explicit instruction on second language processing, bilingualism, and applications to education, speech pathology, and communication tools. Recent projects address emergency communication, accessible public announcements, climate-impacted remote communities in Asia-Pacific, and spatial language in Auslan (Australian Sign Language).

Ito's seminal studies have shown that toddlers with autism respond rapidly to prosodic emphasis and joint attention cues like head turns and pointing, disproving stereotypes of insensitivity. A new collaborative initiative establishes baselines for grammar processing (e.g., plural marking via 's') in typically developing children, extending to those with hearing disabilities, autism, and memory issues to map developmental trajectories and interactions between perception, memory, and syntax. Recognized by The Australian as the Language and Linguistics field leader for highest citations in top journals (2020), her influential publications include 'Anticipatory effects of intonation: Eye movements during instructed visual search' (Ito & Speer, 2008, Journal of Memory and Language); 'Prosody in first language acquisition—Acquiring intonation as a tool to organize information in conversation' (Speer & Ito, 2009, Language and Linguistics Compass); 'The effects of processing instruction and traditional instruction on L2 online processing of the causative construction in French: An eye-tracking study' (Wong & Ito, 2018, Studies in Second Language Acquisition); 'Do explicit instruction and high variability phonetic training improve nonnative speakers’ Mandarin tone productions?' (Wiener, Chan & Ito, 2020, The Modern Language Journal); and chapters such as 'PI and the French causative and passive constructions' (Wong, Ito & Glimois, 2021). Ito teaches courses on phonetics, second language acquisition, bilingualism, language and cognition, and human evaluation of machine translation, supervising PhD theses on L2 acquisition and immersion.