CRL Newsletter
Vol. 14, No. 1
February 2002
News
Recent or upcoming conference presentations
JDP graduate student Suzanne Moineau was chosen to be one of the few graduate students selected to give a talk about her research as part of the Graduate Students Present forum at the annual meeting of Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco in April. Some of you may recall that Cognitive Science graduate student Nicole Wicha was selected for the same forum last year. Congratulations Suzanne!
Cognitive Science graduate students Ayse Pinar Saygin and Frederic Dick, JDP graduate student Analia Arevalo, Cognitive Science postdoctoral fellow Kara Federmeier and faculty Seana Coulson will present posters at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco in April.
CRL was a powerful presence at the annual meeting of the Academy of Aphasia in Boulder this October. Elizabeth Bates, Beverly Wulfeck and Analia Arevalo attended the meeting; JDP graduate student Suzanne Moineau and Cognitive Science graduate students Ayse Pinar Saygin and Frederic Dick presented posters.
Linguistics graduate student Mieko Ueno presented work done jointly with Robert Kluender at the Neurological Basis of Language conference held in Holland in July. She will also present work done with Maria Polinsky in March at the 15th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing in New York.
CRL postdoctoral fellow Kara Federmeier presented work done jointly with Marta Kutas at the Neurological Basis of Language conference held in Holland in July and at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego in November.
Cognitive science graduate student Ayse Pinar Saygin will present a paper written with Stephen Wilson from UCLA at the 38th annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society in April; the presentation will be part of the Sub-Symbolic Approaches to Language Panel which features Jeff Elman and Brian MacWhinney as invited speakers.
Recent or upcoming books and papers
Linguistics professor Andy Kehler recently published a book entitled 'Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar' through CSLI publications. A description is available here.
Some papers recently authored by CRL affiliates are listed below.
- Dick, F., Bates, E., Wulfeck, B., Utman, J., & Dronkers, N. (2001). Language deficits, localization, and grammar: Evidence for a distributive model of language breakdown in aphasics and normals. Psychological Review 108(4), 759-788.
- Federmeier, K.D., McLennan, D.B., De Ochoa, E. and Kutas, M. (in press). The impact of semantic memory organization and sentence context information on spoken language processing by younger and older adults: An ERP study. Psychophysiology.
- Moreno, E.M., Federmeier, K.D., and Kutas, M. (2002). Switching languages, switching palabras (words): An electrophysiological study of code switching. Brain and Language, 80(2), 188-207.
- Saygin, A.P. & Cicekli, I. (2002) Pragmatics in human-computer conversation Journal of Pragmatics 34(3), pp.227-258
- Ueno, M. & Kluender, R. (to appear) Event-related brain indices of Japanese scrambling. Special issue of Brain and Language
Fellowships, scholarships, funding opportunities
CRL is recruiting two post-doctoral researchers for it's training grant in Language, Communication, and Brain. See our website for details
CRL People
David Balota, Professor of Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, is currently on sabbatical in residence at CRL. Balota is a leading cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist who specializes in the study of lexical access, including studies of cognitive aging and Alzheimer's disease. His attention/resource allocation model of language processing represents a significant challenge to both connectionist and traditional symbolic accounts of language architecture. Among his current projects is a massive norming study that will ultimately provide word recognition norms and lexical properties for 40,000 words in English.
CRL has hired Rita Ceponiene as a post-graduate researcher effective 2/1/02. Rita is an MD/PhD with several years experience in recording electrophysiological data from normally developing and developmentally disabled infants and children. She will be working at the Project in Cognition and Neural Development on studies to examine auditory sensory responses in normal development and children with developmental disorders and in the Autism Neuroscience Lab with Dr. Jeanne Townsend to conduct ERP research in a study of brain structural and functional changes in healthy aging.
Holger Keibel, a graduate student at the University of Freiburg and Dr. Heike Behrens from the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthroplogy in Leipzig will be visiting CRL in late March/April. Both will be working with Jeff Elman on language acquisition projects involving the 'dense databases' of child language input & output that are being collected by the MPI. Holger will be here for 2 1/2 months; Heike will be here for a week.