January 2024

Lab news

February 2024

Valeria and Vicky’s work on perspective taking and irony is accepted for publication at “Psychology of Language and Communication” journal. Congrats!

Annie was nominated for Outstanding Senior Award.

Valeria is presenting her work in collaboration of Dr. Matthias Mehl and Vicky on the impact of language and culture on irony perception in Spanish-English bilinguals at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Annual Convention in San Diego from February 8-10.

January 2024

Our lab will be conducting EEG demo to middle schoolers and high schoolers every Tuesdays this semester for / at the Flandrau Science Center & Planetarium.

October 2023

Vicky and collaborators including Rutvik (Desai) published paper “Spatiotemporal characteristics of the neural representation of event concepts” in Brain and Language!

September 2023

Vicky received the 2023 Distinguished Mentoring Award from College of Science at the University of Arizona. Many, many thanks to all of Vicky’s past and current mantees!

August 2023

News coverage “Your brain on emoji” for our lab’s research paper on the effects of emoji on language. Congrats, Val and Vicky! 

Çağatay joined the lab as a first-year PhD student. Welcome, Çağatay!

Valeria and Vicky published new paper “Narratives about cancer: what metaphors can tell us about depressive symptoms in breast cancer patients” in the journal “Health Communication”. Congrats!

Our book chapter is out “Electrophysiology of non-literal language” by Vicky, Ryan, Matt, and Valeria. Many congrats!

Vicky received NSF supplement to bring lab members to Professor Valentina Bambimi’s lab in Pavia Italy for a month in 2024. Yay!

May 2023

Laura won best poster award at the Masters Research Forum 2023. Congrats!

Matt accepted an offer to work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language. He will be decoding brain signals and speech signals to answer questions about language and cognition. Huge congrats!

A photo from the end-of-the-semester lab lunch! 

Lab photo May2023

April 2023

We are holding an outreach event for selected students at Tucson Magnet High School from April-May, during which high school students will learn all about brain and language and get some hands-on experiences with EEG! 

Aurora is presenting “An Unbeatable Enemy or A Conquerable Challenge: Re-Examining the Role of Metaphor in Anxiety Expression and Regulation” in the Honors Thesis poster session. 

Laura is presenting “Emotionality and task goals influence metaphor processing: evidence from ERPs” in the MA research forum.  

Matt is defending his dissertation “The Influence of Age-Related Positivity Bias Effect in Emotional Language Comprehension” on 4/20. 

Vicky is giving an invited talk at Women in Data Science Tucson. The talk format is hybrid. Register freely at Eventbrite to receive the link and location information.  

Lindsay became the second recipient of the annual Nadel graduate fellowship. This award is given to a truly exceptional 1st year student in the CNS program who is pursuing a minor in Cognitive Science. Congrats, Lindsay!

March 2023

We presented at the 36th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP) in Pittsburgh March 9-11. Laura presented her ERP findings on emotional metaphors, and Matt will presented his latest findings on emotional language, prediction, and negativity bias in healthy older adults. Posters are available upon request!

February 2023

Ryan, Nyssa, and Vicky published a new paper: “Predictability and decomposability separately contribute to compositional processing of idiomatic language” in Psychophysiology. Yay!

January 2023

Vicky gave a research talk on “The effects of emotional contexts on the neural representations of words” at University of Florida. The talk was recorded, and the recording is available upon request!

Our mood and language paper is in the news: UA newsNeuroscience news dot comScience DailyAAASAZPM (NPR in south Arizona), and NPR Science Friday (WNYC). More below:

We received WAESO (Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities) grant to support 3 underrepresented minority undergrads and to involve them in research on “EEG and creativity”.  Welcome to the lab, Toscya, Annie, and Sabrina!

December 2022

Vicky’s work, in collaboration with Karim Johari, Nicholas Riccardi, and Rutvik Desai, “Temporal Features of Concepts are Grounded in the Time Perception Neural Networks: An EEG study”, has been accepted in Brain and Language.

November 2022

Vicky’s work, in collaboration with Jos Van Berkum and Peter Hagoort, “Negative affect increases reanalysis on conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge”, has been accepted at Frontiers in Communication. 

October 2022

Yuhua, a PhD student at Northwestern, visited for a week, for our collaboration on brainwaves on creativity!  

Vicky gave research talks at Lancaster University, Newcastle University, and University of College London in the United Kingdom.

Matt presented a poster on emotion prediction in younger and older adults at the Neurobiology of Language Conference (SNL2022) in Philadelphia.

September 2022

Matt presented a poster on “prediction of negative features of words in sentences in younger adults” at the virtual 28th Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference (AMLaP2022).

August 2022

Vicky received a 3-year NSF grant on “Learning science concepts through metaphor comprehension, production, and conversation: Behavioral, neural and artificial intelligence measures”

Matt received two more grants: Taiwanese Overseas Pioneers Grants (TOP Grant) and William Orr Dingwall Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in the Foundation of Language. Excellent work, Matt!

Lindsay has joined the lab as a PhD student in Psychology! Welcome, Lindsay!

July 2022

Matt and Vicky received NSF grant on “Effects of context on emotional word processing in healthy younger and older adults” for Matt’s dissertation. Congratulations, Matt! 

April 2022

Valeria successfully defended her dissertation “Reducing Negative Emotion with Verbal Irony: Insights from Behavior and Event-Related Potentials”. Congratulations, Dr. Pfeifer!

Anna and Vicky’s work in collaboration with Monique Flecken (faculty at University of Amsterdam) “Minding the Manner: Attention to Motion Events in Turkish-Dutch Early Bilinguals” has been accepted for publication at Language & Cognition. Congrats & well done!

March 2022

Valeria is the Psychology Department’s recipient of the College of Science Graduate Student award in the category Service. Congrats! (Update: Valeria is the college-level recipient across departments for her service. Many many congrats!)

February 2022

We will be presenting two posters at HSP 2022 (Conference on Human Sentence Processing). Matt will present “Changes in the affective representation of a word in younger and older adults” and Valeria will present “Irony as a form of Emotion Regulation – Evidence from Behavior and ERPs”.

We will also present two short talks at ELM2 (Experiments in Linguistic Meaning). Matt will talk about affective representations cued by words in context in younger and older adults, and Valeria will talk about how irony regulates negative emotion in speakers and listeners.

Katya will present “The effects of metaphoric instruction on neural representations of scientific concepts” at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS). YAY!

Vicky gives a talk in Seana Coulson and Martha Kutas’ joint lab meeting at University of California San Diego. 

January 2022

Matt, John, and Vicky’s work “Attention and regulation during emotional word comprehension in older adults: Evidence from event-related potentials and brain oscillations” has been accepted for publication at Brain & Language! Congrats everyone!

December 2021

Stanley, Valeria, and Vicky’s work: “Cursed Concepts: New insights on combinatorial processing from ERP correlates of swearing in context” has been accepted for publication at Brain & Language! Well done everyone!

Anna successfully defended her dissertation “The Influence of Language Background on Mental Representations of Events”. Congratulations, Dr. Kamenetski!

November 2021

Anna won the 2021/2022 Outstanding Research in Cognitive Science Award. She and her research would have represented the Cognitive Science Program during the GIDP (Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs) Graduate Student Showcase, were it not for the unfortunate Covid surge in our area. Congrats, Anna!

Stanley successfully defended his dissertation “Expressives:  At the interface of language and cognition”. Congrats, Dr. Donahoo!

Anna received the postdoctoral offer from the AcqVA Aurora Center for Multilingualism at the Arctic University of Norway (Tromsø). She will join their Theme 2: MultiLingual Minds and Crosslinguistic Influence, starting in January 2022. Congrats, Anna!

October 2021

We participated in the Psychology Department’s Halloween event and won the “Most Creative Lab” prize! Yay lab members!

September 2021

Emma, Vicky and Valeria’s work “Do all facial emojis communicate emotion? The impact of facial emojis on perceived sender emotion and text processing” has been accepted for publication at Computers in Human Behavior! Hooray!

August 2021

Katie, Valeria, Grit, and Vicky’s work on “Social acquisition context matters: Increased neural responses for native but not non-native taboo words” was accepted for publication at Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience! Amazing job, Katie!

We will be presenting two posters at the Annual Psychonomic Society Meeting. Anna will present: “Better Memory for Complete Events in Russian: An Effect of Obligatory Aspect Marking.” Valeria will present: “What Irony Reveals about a Speaker’s Mental State: Impact of Timing and Context Emotion”

Li-Chuan (Matt) will be presenting “Changes in the affective representation of words in emotional contexts” at this year’s SNL (Society for the Neurobiology of Language) meeting as slide slams.

Laura has joined the lab as a PhD student in Psychology! Welcome Laura!

May 2021

Stanley started working as an Associate Scientific Consultant at Brain Vision (the EEG company that we use). Congrats, Stanley! 

Valeria won the 2021 Excellence in Teaching Award for Psychology from the College of Science! Congrats, Valeria!

Li-Chuan (Matt) was awarded the 2021 Galileo Circle Scholarship from the College of Science! Congrats, Matt!

April 2021

Valeria was awarded a GPSC Research and Project Grant to pay participants for her upcoming dissertation research. Congrats, Valeria!

Luis received honorable mention for his poster presentation: “Emotional Words in Contexts and Health Aging: EEG experiment” at the 15th Annual Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) Student Conference. Congrats, Luis!

Miranda was awarded a second place award for her poster presentation: “Emotional Words in Contexts and Health Aging: Behavioral experiment” at the 15th Annual Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) Student Conference. Congrats, Miranda!

Sophia received honorable mention for her poster presentation: “Emotional Words in Contexts and Health Aging: Introduction” at the 15th Annual Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) Student Conference. Congrats, Sophia!

Li-Chuan (Matt) won the 2021 Outstanding Research in Cognitive Science Award from the Cognitive Science Graduate Interdisciplinary Program! He will present his research during the Cognitive Science Colloquium on April 30th. Congrats, Matt!

March 2021

Three undergraduate students attended the WAESO student conference and presented their work on emotional word processing in younger and older adults. Well done, Luis, Miranda & Sophia!

Anna presented her work “Event Completion, Not Ongoingness, Is Language Dependent: Crosslinguistic Evidence from ERPs in English and Russian” at the 34th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Good job Anna!

February 2021

Valeria presented her work: The Impact of Verbal Irony on Negativity Over Time at the 2021 Annual GPSC Student Showcase and won first place in her category: Communication & Expression. Congrats, Valeria!

January 2021

We received funding from the Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) for the Spring semester to continue working with students from underrepresented backgrounds in science!

We are looking for paid fMRI participants for a study on learning science concepts! If you are interested, please contact delikishkina@arizona.edu

December 2020

Valeria participated in the Annual Psychology Department Data Blitz and won the award for best Grad Blitz presentation. Congrats, Valeria!

Vicky and Valeria’s work “The Comprehension of Irony in High and Low Emotional Contexts” was accepted for publication in the special issue “The Psychology of Saying What You Don’t Mean” of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. Hooray!

November 2020

Vicky received the university level faculty seed grant titled “Learning science concepts with metaphor and augmented intelligence”.

May 2020

Vicky received George H. Davis Fellowship Award, an award “intended to increase visibility and networking opportunities, and to provide timely recognition in research, scholarship, and creative activities”.  

Rachel successfully defended her Dissertation “Interacting factors in the comprehension of ambiguous three word phrases: local semantic constraints, structural preferences, discourse and task constraints.” Congratulations, Dr. Brown!

Colin graduated with his honors thesis “The role of metaphor in anxiety regulation and expression”. Congrats, Colin!

Valeria was selected one of the two CogSci showcase students in the academic year 2019-2020. She gave a CogSci colloquium talk on “Emojis and text: An ERP study”UA CogSci affiliates can access a recording of the talk online here.

Claudia was awarded a second place best poster award for her poster: “Neural correlates of visual metaphor processing: Introduction” at the 14th Annual Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) Student Conference. Congrats, Claudia!

Alexa was awarded a second place best poster award for her poster: “Neural correlates of visual metaphor processing: Design & stimuli” at the 14th Annual Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) Student Conference. Congrats, Alexa!

April 2020

Stanley and Vicky published a new paper “The mental representation and social aspect of expressives” in Cognition and Emotion. Congrats! 

Lab operations have been moved online in compliance with the stay-at-home order until further notice. Research continues online.

Li-Chuan (Matt) published a new paper “How do extraverts process jokes? An event-related potential study on humor processing” in Brain and Cognition. Congrats, Matt!

March 2020

We have been interviewed by University of Arizona ‘s Research Innovation & Impact media team about how language and words are used during the recent outbreak of COVID-19. Please see here for the full article. Also on Medical Xpress

Three of our undergraduates presented posters on visual metaphors at the 14th Annual Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) Student Conference at Arizona State University on March 3rd. Congrats, Alexa, Claudia and Michelle!

February 2020

Li-Chuan (Matt) and Vicky published a new paper “Personality traits and emotional word recognition: An ERP study” in Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience. Congrats! 

January 2020

We again received funding from Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) to fund three underrepresented undergraduate students. They will continue to work on the research project on “visual metaphors”. 

Katya will join the lab as a post-doc. Welcome, Katya!

Anna started her 3-month internship at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, working on ERP studies of event conceptualizations, co-supervised by Monique Flecken and Vicky. 

Stanley is accepted to present his work on swearwords in context at the 33rd CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing in Amherst, MA. Congrats, Stanley!

Katie is accepted to present her work on context of acquisition on affective perception at the annual CNS (Cognitive Neuroscience Society) meeting in Boston, MA. Congrats, Katie!

We participated in an outreach program where 15 high school students visited the lab to learn about Psycholinguistics in general and the ongoing work in the lab.

December 2019

Daniela graduated with her honors thesis “Motion Events in English and Polish Monolinguals and Bilinguals”. Congrats, Daniela!

We presented three posters at the ASU/UA Cognitive Science Conclave on December 7th in Tucson. Stanley will present: “Concepts be damned! New insights from expressive adjectives”. Anna will present: ” Event Conceptualization in English and Russian Monolinguals and Bilinguals”. Valeria will present: “The Effect of Emojis on Text Processing”. New lab photo.

November 2019

Valeria won the 2019 Outstanding Research in Cognitive Science Award from the Cognitive Science Program. She and her research will represent the Cognitive Science Program during the GIDP (Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs) Graduate Student Showcase.

October 2019

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab participated in the annual Psychology Halloween Fun and won first prize! Congrats, everyone!

Colin received the Honors Legacy Award for his honors thesis research. He will use the fund to continue examining the role of metaphor in anxiety and mental health. Congrats, Colin!

September 2019

We received funding from Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) to fund three underrepresented undergraduate students. They will be trained and will be involved in a specific research project on “visual metaphors”. 

August 2019

lab photo

July 2019

Dr. Lai is invited to a public discussion at Spirit of the Senses Salon: Social Experience of Art, Science, and Cultural in Phoenix, on how the brain finds meaning in metaphors of language.

June 2019

Is it a piece of cake for the brain to interpret a metaphor? NPR Arizona Spotlight6/12/2019. Dr. Lai’s part is from 17-27 min.  

How metaphors make language more colorful! NPR Arizona Science 6/14/2019

May 2019

Anna has been awarded a Linda Waugh / SLAT Research Award (Summer-Fall 2019) in support of her research on whether verb aspect influences event representations in native speakers of English and Russian. Congrats, Anna!

Emma submitted her honor’s thesis titled: “Neurolinguistic Processing and Social Stress of Emojis in Emotionally Ambiguous Text Messages”. Congrats, Emma!

Lab activities: EEG boot camp by Matt and Lab BBQ!

Lab photo April 2019

April 2019

Valeria won best poster award in the spring 2019 Master thesis research forum. Congrats, Valeria!

News release on “UA researcher: Studying metaphors …” in Arizona Daily Star.

News release on “How the brain finds meaning in metaphor” in Science Daily.

March 2019 

Valeria received travel grant from Graduate and Professional Student Council and Psychology Department Spring 2019 Scholarship! Congrats, Valeria!

Dr. Lai has a new paper on when concrete resources are taxed during the comprehension of metaphor. Please see the publication page.

February 2019 

Rachel received the Summer Dissertation Fellowship from the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences for Summer 2019. She will use the funds to continue working on her dissertation examining how readers use context to interpret ambiguous phrases. Congrats, Rachel!

January 2019 

Two posters accepted at the annual meeting of CNS (Cognitive Neuroscience Society) 2019: “Emotional language and healthy aging” by Matt (Li-Chuan) Ku and “Changes in the neural representations of abstract science concepts after metaphoric reasoning” by Vicky Lai.

Two posters accepted at the 32nd CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 2019: “Emotion regulation through irony” by Valeria Pfeifer and “ERP correlates for the meaning and structure of ambiguous phrases in context” by Rachel.

December 2018

Matt (Li-Chuan) Ku received the University of Arizona Research and Project (ReaP) Grants for Spring 2019. He will use the fund to continue working on his EEG study examining emotional language processing in younger and older adults. Congrats, Matt! 

November 2018

Dr. Lai was elected as a Fellow in the Psychonomic Society. 

Stanley received the University of Arizona Research and Project (ReaP) Grants for Fall 2018. He will use the fund for his EEG study examining swear words in context. Congrats, Stanley! 

October 2018

Emma received NSCS (Neuroscience & Cognitive Science) undergraduate research award. She will use the fund to continue working on her EEG study examining emojis, language, and social stress. Congrats, Emma!

April 2018

Caleb won the best poster award at the 13th Annual Arizona WAESO Student Research Conference. Congrats!

March 2018

Stanley received a pre-doctoral grant from Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute (SBSRI) here at U of A. Congrats!

Nyssa presented a poster “Beating around the evergreen bush: Conventionality violations elicit P300” in the 31st Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference at UC Davis from March 15-17.

Stanley presented a poster “Brain potentials of expressive content: New evidence for semantic theory” in the 31st Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference at UC Davis from March 15-17.

Tachelle and Caleb presented their posters on “Learning with Figurative Language” at the 13th Annual Arizona WAESO Student Research Conference at Arizona State University in Phoenix on March 1.

Fall 2017

Dr. Lai was awarded small grants to support underrepresented undergraduate students from Western Alliance to Expand Student Opportunities (WAESO) – ASU for two students in Fall 2017 and four students in Spring 2017.

Dr. Lai was on Maternity leave.

June 2017

Nyssa joined the lab as our postdoc. Welcome, Nyssa!

Tachelle joined the lab through the 2017 NIH Undergraduate Student Research program. Welcome, Tachelle!

Stanley presented “What the hell? What swearing can tell us about conventional implicatures” at XPrag 2017 (the 7th biannual Experimental Pragmatics) in Cologne, Germany. Good job, Stanley!

May 2017

Rachel received the University of Arizona Research and Project (ReaP) Grants for fall 2017. She will use the fund to continue working on her EEG study that examines the processing of multiword expressions in the lab. Congrats, Rachel!

April 2017

Stanley received two awards from Germany: Doctoral Candidates and Young Academics, and Scientists (DAAD) and Studienstiftung des Abgeordnetenhauses von Berlin. He will be working on pragmatics at the Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, starting in October 2017, for a period of one year. Congrats, Stanley!

Emma is awarded the Undergraduate Biology Research program for summer 2017. She will be working on a neuroscience project on spatial navigation using rats with Dr. Jean-Marc Fellous, and a cognitive neuroscience project on human emotion and language with us. Congrats, Emma!

Vicky has a new paper in Brain and Language on the effects of motion speed in action representations. Please see the publication page.

March 2017 

After 7 months of renovation, the EEG lab is functioning now – Hooray!         

August 2016

Vicky started as an assistant professor in Psychology Department and the Cognitive Science program at the University of Arizona.