LANGUAGE, COGNITION & BRAIN SCIENCES AT UC DAVIS
  • Home
  • People
    • Faculty
    • Visiting Faculty
    • Graduate Students
    • Postdoctoral Fellows
    • Alumni
  • Research
    • Research Topics
    • Research Methods
  • Publications
    • Papers and Chapters
    • Books
  • Resources
    • Facilities
    • ERP Bootcamp
    • Sotware
  • Community
  • Prospective Graduate Students

RESEARCH

Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Language Comprehension and Production

Word Processing

  • What are the basic building blocks of words?
  • How do we access the form and meaning of words?
  • How are words represented and organized?

Picture
Giesbrecht, Camblin & Swaab, 2004; Swaab, Baynes & Knight, 2002
Picture
Ferreira et al, 2013
Sentence Processing
  • What are the basic building blocks of sentences?
  • How do sentence structures compare across languages?
  • How do we process sentence structures?
  • Are sentence structures created on the fly or stored in memory?
  • Can sentence processing be facilitated by priming?
  • Do we predict upcoming words in sentences?
  • Which individual cognitive abilities drive individual differences in reading and listening comprehension?
PictureBoudewyn et al, in press

Discourse Processing

  • How does global discourse information interact with local sentence and word information?
  • How do we build memory for discourse?
  • How do we process referential expression?
  • Which individual cognitive abilities drive individual differences in reading and listening comprehension?

Speech Perception
  • How do we recognize speech?
  • What happens when we try to understand speech in noisy environments?
  • How can we translate our knowledge about speech processing to improve hearing aids for hearing impaired individuals?
Picture



Picture
Hill & Miller, 2013
Sign Language
  • What are the basis building blocks of signed words and sentences?
  • How do spoken and signed language compare?
Picture
Picture
Picture
Language Development
  • What is the developmental relationship between language and cognition?
  • How do development of production and comprehension compare across speakers of different ages and cultures?
  • How do babies benefit from statistical  regularities in speech?


Picture
Hay et al, 2013
Picture
Hay et al, 2013
Picture
Picture
Hoversten et al, in press
Bilingualism
  • How do bilingual speakers select the contextually relevant language?
  • Does bilingualism improve cognitive control?
  • How does the bilingual brain develop?

Language Deficits
  • How does language break down in patients with neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism?
  • How does language break down after brain injury due to stroke?
Picture
Swaab et al, 1997
Picture
Swaab et al, 2013
Proudly powered by Weebly