Aine Ito

About me

Hello! I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore.

Research interests

My research focuses on prediction during language comprehension and non-native language processing. Language comprehension in a native language is very efficient. While speakers can easily produce 2-5 words per second, native listeners typically have no conscious difficulty in keeping up with the speech and understanding the meaning of the speech.

But such real-time comprehension can be difficult for non-native speakers. Even if they have sufficient vocabulary and a good grammatical knowledge, they may fail to comprehend sentences as efficiently as native speakers do.

My research investigates what makes it difficult to comprehend a non-native language efficiently and explores ways to facilitate non-native language processing with a focus on predictive processing. I am also interested in how orthographic information influences listening comprehension. I mainly use eye-tracking (visual world paradigm), EEG and reaction time measures in my experiments.

Keywords

Psycholinguistics, Language prediction, Non-native language processing, Bilingualism, Sentence comprehension, Orthographic processing, Visual world paradigm, EEG/ERP

Supervision

I am happy to take on MA/PhD students in these areas. Please email me if you are interested :) The deadline for the August admission is 1 November of the previous year. If you are a current BA/MA student and interested in persuing a PhD at NUS, you may be interested in applying for the IRIS@NUS programme.

Open Science

I believe that science must be open and transparent. As a signatory of the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative, I make all my (anonymised) data and analysis scripts publicly available on my Open Science Framework page whenever possible.

Contacts

	Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences National University of Singapore Block AS5, 7 Arts Link, 117570 Singapore (Office: AS5-05-11, Psycholinguistics Lab: AS5-02-04)

	+65 65166042
	Research Gate Google Scholar Open Science Framework Web of Science (for review records) ORCID GitHub

News

April 2025

Many papers from our special issue Individual differences in language prediction are now published in Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science!

March 2025

I presented two posters on the role of working memory on prediction at HSP 2025! One of them presented a study with Zifei Wang and Ethan Hui.

December 2024

Some of our lab members presented their research at AMLaP Asia 2024!
Mingyuan Yang gave a talk on prediction of orthographic and phonological information, Daiwen Gong presented a poster on prediction of sound and number information, and Danning Sun presented a poster on prediction revision in bilinguals' non-dominant language.

November 2024

Our paper (with Ana Bautista and Clara Martin) on cognate facilitation effect on verb-based prediction has been accepted for publication in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition!
We found that the cognate facilitation effect extends to cognate verb-based prediction but only in low-proficient L2 speakers. You can download the paper from here (Open access).
We presented this study at the Psychonomic Society's Annual Meeting. A copy of the poster is here.

October 2024

My paper on effects of prediction instructions on L2 word recognition has been published in Language Learning!
The study tested if encouraging prediction via instructions facilitates word recognition in L2. The prediction instruction sped up target word recognition but lowered recognition accuracy when the target was unpredictable. You can download the paper from here. (Open access)