CRL Newsletter

Congratulations to Marta Kutas! Marta was honored in October with the Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychophysiology Award from the Society for Psychophysiological Research. The Society for Psychophysiological Research is the oldest and the most prominent society in the field. This award was first given in 1969 and there have been only a total of 24 recipients so far. Marta is the third woman to receive this highest award in psychophysiology. Marta received the award at the society's 47th annual meeting held in Savannah, Georgia, and was also honored with a symposium. Celebrating her seminal work on the psychophysiology of language processing and her continuing (and "driving") influence in the field, the symposium featured four former students of Kutas', including Robert Kluender, currently on the Linguistics faculty at UCSD. "Relatively few disciplines in science can clearly trace their roots to a single investigator and perhaps even more impressive, to a single study," read the symposium abstract. "Twenty-seven years ago Marta Kutas (along with Steve Hillyard) published in the journal Science what has turned out to be one of the most important and frequently cited studies in psychophysiology."

Congratulations also go to Marta for her appointment to the board of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind.

Congratulations to Carol Padden! Carol is one of two members of the faculty or staff at UCSD to be nominated as a Faculty Research Lecturer. This honor is given to those whose research is deemed to have made a particularly significant contribution to the advancement of knowledge. Carol will present a public lecture on a topic of her choice.

Congratulations to Jenny Staab who defended her Ph.D. dissertation in December. Her dissertation was entitled "Negation in Context: Electrophysiological and Behavioral Investigations of Negation Effects in Discourse Processing."

Congratulations to Gabriela Simon-Cereijido who, in November, received the New Century Scholars Program Doctoral Scholarship from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation.

CRL welcomes Sarah Creel. Sarah is a new professor in Cognitive Science at UCSD. She uses a variety of methodologies to explore how children and adults learn and process complex acoustic information, especially words, and also other types of temporally-patterned stimuli such as music. For instance, she has begun studying how the speech signal is interpreted moment-by-moment (on-line) by examining participants’ eye movements to objects as a word elapses over time.

CRL welcomes Philip Hofmeister. Philip comes to us from the linguistics department at Stanford. He has accepted a post-doctoral position in CRL starting in January. He'll be doing ERP research with Marta Kutas and Robert Kluender.

CRL welcomes Erica Ellis to the UCSD/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders. Erica is studying word learning and the range of implicit learning abilities in young children, investigating factors such as exposure and parental influence.

CRL welcomes Roberto Gutierrez to the UCSD/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders. Roberto is studying the effects of L1 phonotactic constraints on second language sentence processing.

CRL welcomes Amy Pace to the UCSD/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders. Amy is studying how pragmatic and linguistic cues assist 2-year-olds in segmenting dynamic human action and attaching a novel label to a target action.

CRL welcomes Lara Polse to the UCSD/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders. Lara is using Event Related Potentials (ERPs) to investigate the nature of language processing in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI).

CRL welcomes Jonathan Udoff to the UCSD/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders. Jonathan's research focuses on the psycholinguistics of sign languages and of bilingualism. He is particularly interested in how bimodal bilingualism differs from mono-modal bilingualism. In addition to ASL, Jonathan speaks Spanish and Catalan.

Language-related Conferences 2008

Conference	From	To	Location	Deadline
European Workshop on Cognitive Neuropsychology	01/20/08	01/25/08	Bressanone, Italy	00/00/00
CUNY Sentence Processing	03/13/08	03/15/08	Chapel Hill, North Carolina	00/00/00
XVIth Biennial Int'l Conference on Infant Studies	03/27/08	03/29/08	Vancouver, Canada	00/00/00
Society for Research on Child Development	04/02/09	04/04/09	Denver, Colorado	08/22/08
American Academy of Neurology	04/12/08	04/19/08	Chicago, Illinois	00/00/00
Cognitive Neuroscience Society	04/12/08	04/15/08	San Francisco, California	00/00/00
Association for Psychological Science Convention	05/22/08	05/25/08	Chicago, Illinois	01/31/08
Acoustics08	06/29/08	07/04/08	Paris, France	00/00/00
Acoustical Society of America	11/10/08	11/14/08	Miami, Florida
Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders	06/05/08	06/07/08	Madison, Wisconsin	02/01/08
Human Brain Mapping	06/15/08	06/19/08	Melbourne, Australia	00/00/00
Association of Computational Linguistics	06/15/08	06/20/08	Columbus, Ohio	00/00/00
Annual Summer Interdisciplinary Conference	07/06/08	07/11/08	Madonna di Campiglio, Italy
Society for Text and Discourse	07/12/08	07/15/08	Memphis, Tennessee	02/15/08
Annual Summer School in Cognitive Science	06/30/08	07/19/08	Sofia, Bulgaria	01/31/08
Cognitive Science Society	07/23/08	07/26/08	Washington, D.C.	02/01/08
Cognitive Science Assoc for Interdisciplinary Learning	07/31/08	08/04/08	Hood River, Oregon
Interspeech-Eurospeech	09/22/08	09/26/08	Brisbane, Australia	04/07/08
Society for Neuroscience	11/15/08	11/19/08	Washington, D.C.
Psychonomic Society	11/13/08	11/16/08	Chicago, Illinois
American Speech-Hearing Association	11/20/08	11/22/08	Chicago, Illinois	03/31/08