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?

Giesbrecht, Camblin & Swaab, 2004; Swaab, Baynes & Knight, 2002

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?

Boudewyn 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?

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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?

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Hill & Miller, 2013

Sign Language

• What are the basis building blocks of signed words and sentences?
• How do spoken and signed language compare?
  

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?

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Hay et al, 2013

Hay et al, 2013

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?
  

Swaab et al, 1997

Swaab et al, 2013