Masaya Yoshida is a Research Professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA). He is a member of the Center of Theoretical Linguistics (CLT), and a member of the Department of Catalan Philology. He was Associate Professor of Linguistics at Northwestern University, before joining ICREA. He obtained PhD in Linguistics from University of Maryland (2001-2006) and he pursued an ESRC post-doctoral fellowship at the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh (2006-2007).

Syntactic structure building, or parsing, is one of the crucial components in the mechanism of sentence comprehension. Upon receiving the bottom-up input (e.g., words), the comprehender builds a partial sentence structure, integrates each successive bottom-up input into the currently built partial parse, and achieves semantic representation. Thus, in this view, it is expected that grammatical structural constraints constrain the time-course of online sentence comprehension. My recent studies have been trying to show that rich and sophisticated grammatical structures are build and utilized during online processing of sentences.