Dr. Sanako Mitsugi serves as a Lecturer in Japanese and Japanese Major Convenor within the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland, part of the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature from Waseda University in Japan, along with a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy in Second Language Acquisition from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. Prior to her current position, Dr. Mitsugi worked at the University of Kansas in the USA.

Her research centers on second language processing, delving into the cognitive mechanisms underlying second language parsing and learning. Dr. Mitsugi examines prediction-driven models in morphosyntactic processing and the extent to which predictive processes function in nonnative language comprehension, identifying mediating factors. She utilizes behavioral research methods such as reaction times, eye-tracking in comprehension and production tasks, and corpus-linguistic techniques. Key publications encompass 'Maternal passives addressed to Japanese-speaking children: a usage-based approach' with Haruka Fukuda (First Language, 2022), 'Polarity adverbs facilitate predictive processing in L2 Japanese' (Second Language Research, 2021), 'Generating predictions based on semantic categories in a second language: a case of numeral classifiers in Japanese' (International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 2020), 'Proficiency influences orthographic activations during L2 spoken-word recognition' (International Journal of Bilingualism, 2018), 'Incremental comprehension of Japanese passives: evidence from the visual-world paradigm' (Applied Psycholinguistics, 2017), and 'The use of case marking for predictive processing in second language Japanese' with Brian MacWhinney (Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2016). Her scholarship has accumulated approximately 299 citations on Google Scholar. Dr. Mitsugi has received funding including grants from the Queensland Program for Japanese Education for 'The multilingual mind at work: case transfer across languages' (2025-2026), 'Developing and Validating a Japanese C-test' (2025), and 'Language learning as a product of syntactic adaptation: Evidence from second-language Japanese' (2020-2025), as well as a UQ Early Career Researcher grant for 'Cue adaptivity in predictive processing in Japanese' (2020-2021). She supervises doctoral students on second language acquisition topics and is available for additional supervision.

Professional Email: s.mitsugi@uq.edu.au