CRL Newsletter
Vol. 12, No. 1
May 2000
News
Recent Events:
CRL is the UCSD home to the SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders. This new Ph.D. program now has its first graduate! Kathryn Kohnert has successfully defended a Ph.D. thesis on lexical access in bilingual children, demonstrating a "crossover" from Spanish dominance to English dominance in both comprehension and production across the elementary school years. After participating in graduation ceremonies on both campuses (to make all her professors happy), Kathi will leave in August to take up a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Communicative Disorders at the University of Minnesota. Congratulations Kathi!
On Tuesday, April 18, CRL hosted a stunning lecture by Vittorio Gallese of the University of Parma, on "Mirror neurons: implications for language, technology and culture". This was one of the largest lectures that CRL has ever hosted within its weekly seminar series. We had to move the lecture at the last minute to a room twice the size of the CRL Conference Room, which was still filled to capacity, with enthusiastic listeners crowding in the doors.
CRL member Dr. Joan Stiles delivered the UCSD Millennium Lecture to a standing-room-only crowd on Tuesday April 11. This lecture has already appeared in several broadcasts on UCSD TV.
New Fellowship Recipients:
CRL has awarded two post-doctoral fellowships on our NIH training grant, "Language, Communication, and the Brain" for the 2000-2001 academic year:
Kara Federmeier is Year 2000 PhD graduate of the UCSD Department of Cognitive Science. In her dissertation, Kara used event-related brain potentials (ERP) to study sentential effects on the recognition and comprehension of related or unrelated pictures and words. In her postdoctoral year, she will continue to study how meaning is represented and accessed in the brain, combining ERP and behavioral techniques with functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Robert Thornton is a Year 2000 graduate from the University of Southern California, with a PhD in Cognitive Psychology. His research interests are in experimental psycholinguistics, specifically examining sentence-level comprehension and production. At UCSD, he will work with Jeff Elman and other faculty, combining psycholinguistic studies with neural network modeling.
CRL will provide graduate student fellowships for six students for the 2000-2001 academic year from the NIH training grant, "Language, Communication, and the Brain":
- Analia Arevalo, Language & Communicative Disorders
- David Groppe, Cognitive Science
- Jelena Jovanovic, Cognitive Science
- Elizabeth Oster, Language & Communicative Disorders
- Lloyd Slevc, Psychology
- Mieko Ueno, Linguistics
Meet some of our visitors:
Zhijun (David) Wen & Guiling (Gloria) Hu are visiting CRL for the 1999-2000 academic year, from the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. They are preparing several articles for the Chinese audience on recent theoretical advances in emergentism, connectionism, and dynamical systems as alternatives to the Chomskian paradigm. They are also interested in our ongoing studies of language processing in bilinguals.
John Lewis is a visiting graduate student from the McGill University, Department of Linguistics, who has spent the year working with Jeff Elman on connectionist models of language acquisition.
Tatiana Akhutina is visiting this June from Moscow State University, preparing two articles on language processing in Russian-Speaking aphasics (with Elizabeth Bates and Maria Polinsky).