She received her PhD in psycholinguistics from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2005. After the completion of her PhD, she spent two years at Neuropsychology Department, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany for her postdoctoral fellowship. Dr. Hirotani is investigating the mechanisms of human language processing. Her current research interests are focused on the following areas: 1) adult sentence processing, 2) use of auditory information in sentence processing by adults and children, and 3) neural correlates for language processing.