I am an Assistant Professor at NINJAL in Tokyo, Japan. I study language comprehension in humans using a combination of theoretical, experimental, and computational approaches.
- Keywords: Language comprehension, working memory, syntax, categorial grammars
- Email: s-isono at ninjal
- Twitter, Researchmap
Publications
Preprints
- Isono, S., Kajikawa, K., Oseki, Y., Asahara, M. (2025). Modeling memory effects in a head-final language with category locality. PsyArXiv [paper]
Journal articles
- Isono, S. (2024). Category Locality Theory: A unified account of locality effects in language comprehension. Cognition 247, 105766. [paper]
- Isono, S. & Hirose, Y. (2023). Pre-verb reactivation of arguments in sentence processing. Glossa Psycholinguistics, 2(1). [paper]
Peer-reviewed conference proceedings
- Yoshida, R., Isono, S., Kajikawa, K., Someya, T., Sugimoto, Y., & Oseki, Y. (2025). If Attention Serves as a Cognitive Model of Human Memory Retrieval, What is the Plausible Memory Representation? To appear in ACL 2025. [paper]
- Isono, S., Hasegawa, T., Kajikawa, K., Kono, K., Nakamura, S., & Oseki, Y. (2023). Formalizing argument structures with Combinatory Categorial Grammar. Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS) 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 14213, 83–99. [paper]
- Isono, S. & Hirose, Y. (2022). Psycholinguistic evidence for severing arguments from the verb. Japanese/Korean linguistics, 29, 437-446. [paper]
Peer-reviewed talks/posters/abstracts (selected)
- Isono, S., & Kajikawa, K. (2025). Grammar as logic, processing as deduction, actions as theorems, states as propositions. CPL 2025 (spotlight poster). [poster]
- Kajikawa, K., & Isono, S. (2025). Syntactic Node Count as Index of Predictability. CPL 2025.
- Isono, S., Kajikawa, K., & Oseki, Y. (2024). 日本語大規模読み時間コーパスにおける記憶の負荷のCCGによるモデリング [Modeling memory load in a Japanese large-scale reading time corpus with CCG]. The 168th Conference of the Linguistic Society of Japan. Best presentation award
Non peer-reviewed talks/posters/abstracts (selected)
- Isono, S.*, Kajikawa, K.*, Sugimoto, Y*, Asahara, M., & Oseki, Y. (2025). CCGによる日本語データのモデリング [Modeling Japanese EEG data with CCG]. NLP2025, Nagasaki, Japan. (*co-first) Conference committee special award [paper]
Theses
- Isono, S. (2025). Syntactic processing as dynamic logical inference under resource limitations. PhD Thesis, University of Tokyo. The First National High School Memorial Award
- Isono, S. (2022). On Processing and Representation of Verbs and Their Arguments. Master Thesis, University of Tokyo. The First National High School Memorial Award
Grants
- JSPS KAKENHI Grant JP25K22996 認知資源の制約下で動作する人間の言語理解機構の特性と限界の解明 [Elucidating human language comprehension under cognitive resource limitations] FY 2025–2027
- Grants-in-Aid for JSPS fellows (DC2) JP23KJ0538 ヒトの文理解における動詞・項関係の逐次的な構築のメカニズムの解明 [Study on the incremental building of verb-argument relations in human sentence comprehension] FY 2022–2024
Education
- PhD, Univesity of Tokyo, 2025
- MA, University of Tokyo, 2022
- Bachelor of Law, University of Tokyo, 2015
- Exchange student, University of Toronto, 2013-2014