Keiko Murasugi was born in Nagano, Japan and received BA and MA from Tsuda College in Tokyo, where she became interested in language acquisition. She continued her studies at the University of Connecticut, specializing in the acquisition of syntax. After completing her Ph.D. in 1991, she taught at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan for seven years and then, moved to Nanzan University, also in Nagoya. She is currently a professor of linguistics in the Faculty of Global Liberal Studies there.  

She has worked on syntax and the acquisition of syntax, and has recently published papers on mimetics and the syntax of Japanese dialects as well. Her recent publications include “Root Infinitive Analogues in Child Chinese and Japanese” (in Chinese Syntax in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective, Oxford University Press, 2014), “Children’s ‘Erroneous’ Intransitives, Transitives and Causatives” (in Transitivity and Valency Alternations: Studies in Japanese and Beyond, Mouton de Gruyter, 2016), “The Structure of Mimetic Verbs in Child and Adult Japanese” (in Ideophones, Mimetics and Expressiveness, John Benjamins, 2019), “Parameterization in Labeling: Evidence from Child Language” (The Linguistic Review 37, 2020), and “Binomial Adjective doublets in Japanese: A Relational Morphology Account” (Morphology 32, 2022).