Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab (Swaab)
The Laboratory for the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language focuses on the psychological and neural mechanisms of language comprehension. The lab studies when and how different kinds of contextual information, including syntactic, thematic, semantic and referential information are integrated during reading and listening comprehension, and identifies the neural substrates of these integration processes.
Full Lab Website
Research Topics
Individual Differences in Language
This project examines the time course of the influence of individual word meanings (e.g., lexical association), syntactic factors, and the larger discourse context as a function of main effects or interactions on measures of working memory, cognitive control, and language experience.
Syntactic Priming in Comprehension
To understand a sentence, comprehenders identify the meanings of the words in the sentence, and they also determine how the words in the sentence relate to one another. We use eye-tracking and electrophysiological (ERP) methods to assess how comprehenders respond to sentences.
Bilingualism
Bilingual language comprehension studies examine if language context can selectively direct and predict comprehension of the input language. We are also interested in assessing whether individual language proficiency and cognitive control abilities modulate language selection as a function of language context.
