Katsura Aoyama, Ph.D.

Psycho-Linguistics Lab

Katsura Aoyama, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in Speech-Language Pathology. Prior to joining UNT in 2012, Dr. Aoyama has held an appointment of Assistant/Associate Professor at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center from August 2002 to July 2012. Dr. Aoyama holds a B.A. degree in Japanese Philology from Kansai University, an M.A. degree and a Ph.D. degree in Linguistics from University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Dr. Aoyama has authored and co-authored many peer-reviewed publications. Her research interests include speech and language acquisition in typically-developing children and second language acquisition. Her particular research interest is studying phonetic, phonological, and prosodic characteristics of different languages and how children and adults acquire those characteristics.

Dr. Aoyama is on the Board of Directors of the Texas Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation. She has been serving as the Scholarship Committee Chair of the TSHF since 2016.

Dr. Aoyama was featured as one of the seven “North Stars” in Fall 2021: https://northtexan.unt.edu/node/22418

My main research areas are language acquisition and psycholinguistics. I have investigated children and adults who speak a variety of languages, including American English, Finnish, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Mavea, and Guinaang Bontok. My main interest is to study how languages differ in phonetic and phonological aspects and how these cross-linguistic differences affect children’s acquisition of their first language as well as the acquisition of a second language (L2).

Language acquisition, psycholinguistics