I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Computational Linguistics at Georgetown, advised by Prof. Ethan G. Wilcox.
My research lies at the intersection of psycholinguistics and computational linguistics. I am investigating human sentence processing through the lens of information theory and syntactic structures.
Previously, I was at NINJAL, working with Prof. Yusuke Kubota and Prof. Shinnosuke Isono. Before that, I earned my M.A. and B.A. in Linguistics from UTokyo.
👉日本での活動についてはこちら (Activities in Japan)
- 📄: CV (last updated: Feb. 2026)
- ✉️:
kk1571 [at] georgetown.edu
News
- 03.2026: I’m going to Boston to give a poster presentation at HSP!
- 02.2026: Our new preprint is out! We propose an information-theoretic storage cost!
- 01.2026: Check out our new preprint on the nature of syntactic Node Count!
- 08.2025: Started PhD at Georgetown Linguistics.
- 12.2024: Best Paper Award at CoNLL2024.
→ Older news
Publications
Information-Theoretic Storage Cost in Sentence Comprehension
Kohei Kajikawa, Shinnosuke Isono, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
arXiv preprint, 2026.
The Dual Nature of Syntactic Node Count: Facilitating and Inhibiting Sentence Comprehension
Kohei Kajikawa, Shinnosuke Isono
PsyArxiv preprint, 2026.
Rethinking the Relationship between the Power Law and Hierarchical Structures
Kai Nakaishi, Ryo Yoshida, Kohei Kajikawa, Koji Hukushima, Yohei Oseki
To appear in TACL, 2026.
Modeling memory effects in a head-final language with category locality
Shinnosuke Isono, Kohei Kajikawa, Yohei Oseki, Masayuki Asahara
PsyArxiv preprint, 2025.
If Attention Serves as a Cognitive Model of Human Memory Retrieval, What is the Plausible Memory Representation?
Ryo Yoshida, Shinnosuke Isono, Kohei Kajikawa, Taiga Someya, Yushi Sugimoto, Yohei Oseki
ACL, 2025.
Is Structure Dependence Shaped for Efficient Communication?: A Case Study on Coordination
Kohei Kajikawa, Yusuke Kubota, Yohei Oseki
CoNLL, 2024. [slides]
🏆Best Paper Award
Dissociating Syntactic Operations via Composition Count
Kohei Kajikawa, Ryo Yoshida, Yohei Oseki
CogSci, 2024. [slides]
Formalizing Argument Structures with Combinatory Categorial Grammar
Shinnosuke Isono, Takuya Hasegawa, Kohei Kajikawa, Koichi Kono, Shiho Nakamura, Yohei Oseki
Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS), 2023. [slides]
Conference Presentations
- Kohei Kajikawa and Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox. 2026. Spillover as Rational Processing Delay in Sentence Comprehension. Human Sentence Processing (HSP). [abstract] [poster]
- Shinnosuke Isono and Kohei Kajikawa. 2025. Grammar as logic, processing as deduction, actions as theorems, states as propositions. Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting (CPL). 📣Spotlight poster presentation [abstract] [poster]
- Kohei Kajikawa and Shinnosuke Isono. 2025. Syntactic Node Count as Index of Predictability. Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting (CPL). [abstract] [poster]
- Kohei Kajikawa*, Shinnosuke Isono*, Yushi Sugimoto*, Masayuki Asahara, and Yohei Oseki. 2025. Exploring spatial and temporal dynamics of language comprehension in the brain with CCG. CogSci. (*=equal contribution) [url] [poster]
- Kohei Kajikawa. 2023. Analyzing Japanese Cleft Construction in Combinatory Categorial Grammar. Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS). [abstract] [slides]
Awards and Honors
- 12.2024: Best Paper Award. CoNLL2024
- 06.2025: Director’s Award. NINJAL
- 06.2025: Young Researcher Encouragement Award. NINJAL
- 03.2025: Young Researcher Encouragement Award. ANLP
- 03.2025: Committee Special Award. ANLP
- 03.2024: Committee Special Award. ANLP
Grants and Fellowships
- 03.2026: Travel Grant for Human Sentence Processing 2026
- 12.2025: Travel Grant for Computational Psycholinguistics Meeting 2025 supported by MultiplEYE COST Action
- 12.2025: Travel Grant supported by Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University
- 04.2025: JSPS Research Fellowship (DC1)
- JPY 200,000/month + JPY 3,900,000 (research grant over 3 yrs)
- 09.2025: Declined the fellowship upon accepting an offer to pursue doctoral training abroad.
Academic Service
Peer Reviewing
- CoNLL2025 (💪Outstanding reviewer), LREC2026, CMCL2026
Education
- 08.2025 - Present: Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics, Georgetown University
- 04.2025 - 08.2025: Ph.D. in Linguistics, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL)
- 04.2023 - 03.2025: M.A. in Linguistics, The University of Tokyo
- 04.2019 - 03.2023: B.A. in Linguistics (minor in Computer Science), The University of Tokyo