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Yasuyo Minagawa-Kawai
■Affiliation
Associate Professor (Non-tenured), Graduate School of Human Relations, Keio University
■Research Interests
My primary research interest is the cerebral bases of human communication ability. My research centers on infant's neurocognitive development in relation to language acquisition and social cognition. In my recent study, I use noninvasive technology, near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and behavioral methods to investigate the functional cerebral lateralization and its relation to acquisition of linguistic and acoustic properties of speech.
■Academic Degrees
Bachelor of Liberal Arts, Division of Language, International Christian University, Japan. Master of Arts, Division of Comparative Culture, Graduate School of International Christian University, Japan. Doctor of Philosophy (Medicine), Division of Neuroscience, Department of Speech Science, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Japan
■Award
Phonetic Society of Japan 2008.
■Peer-Reviewed Articles
Minagawa-Kawai, Y., Naoi, N., Kikuchi, N., Yamamoto, J. and Kojima, S. "Cerebral laterality for phonemic and prosodic cue decoding in children with autism." Neuroreport 20 (13), pp.1219-1224, 2009.
Minagawa-Kawai, Y., Matsuoka, S., Dan, I. Naoi, N. Nakamura, K. and Kojima, S. "Prefrontal responses associated with social attachment: facial emotion recognition in mothers and infants." Cerebral Cortex 19, pp. 284-292, 2009.
Minagawa-Kawai, Y., Mori, K., Hebden, J. and Dupoux, E. "Optical imaging of infants' neurocognitive development: Recent advances and prospects." Developmental Neurobiology 68 (6), pp. 712-728, 2008.
Minagawa-Kawai, Y., Mori, K., Naoi, N. and Kojima, S. "Neural attunement processes in infants during the acquisition of a language-specific phonemic contrast." Journal of Neuroscience 27 (2), pp.315-321, 2007.
Hashimoto, T., Minagawa-Kawai, Y., and Kojima, S. "Motion illusion activates the visual motion area of the brain: a near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) study." Brain Research 1077(1), pp. 116-122, 2006
Minagawa-Kawai, Y., Mori, K. and Sato, Y. "Different brain strategies underlie the categorical perception of foreign and native phonemes," Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17 (9), pp. 1376-1385, 2005.
Minagawa-Kawai, Y., Mori, K., Sato, Y. and Koizumi, T. "Differential cortical responses in second language learners to different Japanese phonemic contrasts," Neuroreport 15 (5), pp. 899-903, 2004.
Minagawa-Kawai, Y., Mori, K., Furuya, I., Hayashi, R. and Sato, Y. "Assessing cerebral representations of short / long vowel categories by NIRS," Neuroreport, 13 (5), pp.581-584, 2002.
■Book
Minagawa-Kawai, Y. Naoi, N. and Kojima, S. (2009) "New approach to functional neuroimaging: Near Infrared Spectroscopy." Keio University Press.