Junko Itō is a linguist. She was born in Japan and works in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1986 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her doctoral supervisor was Alan Prince. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was chair of the department from 1999-2006.
Itō mostly researches phonology and morphology. Her work on syllable structure is well-known. She has studied and written about rendaku in the Japanese language. Her work has been published in Linguistic Inquiry and other peer-reviewed research journals in linguistics. She often works with another UCSC professor, her husband Armin Mester.
She is the daughter of mathematician Kiyoshi Itō.