The EMaC lab has finally held their first in-person lab party of the past two years to celebrate their finished projects, accepted manuscripts and all other achievements! During the party, the lab members got the chance to meet with Evan (the youngest RA of the lab)!
The lab is excited to get started on a project, in collaboration with Karen Emmorey’s lab at San Diego State University, which investigates the visual and linguistic factors that predict the size of the perceptual span in hearing and deaf readers.
Congratulations to Nesli for being awarded the Psi Chi research grant for her individual honors thesis project! She will receive $1,500 for her project to collect ERP data over the summer and upcoming fall semester. Her project will focus on the functional role of the N400 event-related potential component during word recognition and sentence comprehension.
This year, the psychology department offered two awards for a graduating senior (Dimitri) and Junior-come-Senior (Nesli). Each of them received $ 5,000 in tuition reduction and were selected as the winners among two pools of highly competitive applicants. Keep up the great work!!
Congratulations to Victoria and Sam for being awarded Psi Chi research grants for their individual honors thesis projects! They will receive $1,500 per project to collect data over the upcoming summer and fall semesters. Their projects will focus on the role of language-related ERPs during word recognition and semantic integration.
Congratulations to our alumna, Anna Marie, on publishing her honors thesis with the USF Psychology Honors Program in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review! Her project looks at how music interferes with working memory for language and how musical training may be correlated with greater verbal working memory! Special thanks to our collaborators Dr. Jennifer Bugos @ The School of Music, University of South Florida, and Dr. Brennan Payne @ The University of Utah (LAMA Lab). Read more here: https://rdcu.be/cbCWP
This year’s Florida Psycholinguistics Meeting was held virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic. That means that the poster presentations are available in perpetuity for your viewing pleasure at these links:
Neslihan Caliskan: https://osf.io/ujtkw/
Makayla Hodges & Jillian Hansen: https://osf.io/gkz9m/
Dimitri Brunelle: https://osf.io/wtpcq/
Neslihan’s project investigates the role of different sources of information (e.g. sentence context, orthography, lexical status) in the generation of the N400 component as well as its functional nature during sentence comprehension.
Makayla’s and Jillian’s project investigates how contextual predictions facilitate silent reading with the use of stress and rhythm patterns. They find that stress patterns are accessed from the parafovea when contextual predictions and pre-activated prosodic information are present.
Dimitri’s project aims to develop and refine the plausibility and cloze norming techniques in the domain of music in an effort to construct an ideal paradigm where the neural overlap of music and language is elucidated.
This year’s Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference was held virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic. That means that Sara’s presentation slideshow is available in perpetuity for your viewing pleasure at this link: https://osf.io/hn2kj/. Her project investigates how the quality of visual input influences the use of context and impacts subsequent processing. She finds that while visual quality does not affect the use of context in lexical retrieval, visual quality is necessary for later processes involving integration of conflicting contextual and visual representations.
Congratulations to Anna Marie on receiving a Phi Kappa Phi Fellowship to fund her Master’s in Mental Health Counseling degree at Columbia in the fall! Established in 1932, the Fellowship Program annually provides funding to first-year graduate students who are pursuing post-baccalaureate degrees across all academic disciplines.
The LINK Award, sponsored by Brown University, provides $4,000 in funding for summer research opportunities that allow students to develop knowledge specific to a career and valuable work skills. With this funding, Karina will be working as an undergraduate RA in the lab (currently remotely), continuing research and data analysis on our decision-making project. The LINK award will help her diversify and hone her research experiences this summer and prepare her to apply to graduate programs in Cognitive Neuroscience in the coming year. Congratulations Karina!
The EMaC Lab