Her first master’s degree was an M.A. in TESOL in 1991. She then investigated the interaction of L1 and L2 in the mental lexicon of advanced Japanese learners of English in New York for her M.Ed. in Applied Linguistics at Teachers College, Columbia University (1992). Since then she has been interested in the influence of memory on L1 and L2 language comprehension. She studied antecedent reactivation in Japanese scrambling constructions and the influence of working memory, which led to her PhD in Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics at the University of Essex in 2003. She is currently studying the interaction of working memory and L1 and L2 sentence processing with her students at Kochi University.