Research scientist position: Center for Brain Science 916 views

RIKEN Center for Brain Science has Research scientist position at Reiko Mazuka Lab for Language Development, Center for Brain Science (W20049).

About the position:

• The successful candidate will participate in the international comparative research on language acquisition: our collaborators are in South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Canada, USA, Italy, and France: we compare developmental differences among languages, and between Asian and Western languages: Japanese, Korean, Thai, Mandarin Chinese, English, French, Italian etc.
• The successful candidate will investigate language development in infants and toddlers, with a focus on speech perception, speech and vocabulary development, and analyzing phonetic characteristics of conversational speech sound between mother and baby.
• She/he will execute behavioral experiments, as well as recording and analyzing conversational interaction between a mother and an infant.
• She/he will contribute to experimental design, execution of experiments, analyzing data, and writing papers for peer reviewed journals cooperatively with the other lab members and our research collaborators. If she/he does not have experience in infant experiments, we will offer the opportunity for training.
• In this international collaborative research, she/he will be asked to travel to other institutions inside and outside of Japan. Social skills to work well with the members of Japanese and international collaborative team will be essential.

Qualifications:

• Candidate should possess a doctoral degree in developmental psychology, phonetics, linguistics, neuroscience or a related field and research experience.
• Robust experience and demonstrated achievement in the areas below are highly expected:
• Research experience on phonological comprehension in infants and children
• High motivation to learn according to our research interests.
• Japanese language skills are expected so that she/he can explain the experiments in Japanese to participants.

Applications:

Application to be sent as the PDF formatted application by email to naoko.kijima@riken.jp with the required documents:

• Cover letter: motivation, research interests and achievements (within 2 pages)
• Complete CV (with photo and email address)
• List of research achievement, publications, and external funds
• 2 letters of recommendation (including one from the current supervisor, If available)