Sarah Fagan (co-authors: Carolyn Whitehead, Jeffery Davis, Mary Johnson) presented "Moving forward: The development of a discourse marker" at Studies in the History of the English Language (SHEL-12), University of Washington, May 19, 2022.

Steady-state visual evoked potential (ssVEP) frequency tagging is an increasingly used method in electrophysiological studies of visual attention and perception. Frequency tagging is suitable for studies examining a wide range of populations, including infants and children. Frequency tagging involves the presentation of different elements of a visual array at different temporal rates, thus using stimulus timing to “tag” the brain response to a given element by means of a unique time signature. Leveraging the strength of the ssVEP frequency tagging method to isolate brain responses to concurrently presented and spatially overlapping visual objects requires specific signal processing methods.

Wenqi Zeng is the recipient of the Graduate College Post-Comprehensive Research Fellowship for 2022. This fellowship program provides an opportunity for advanced Ph.D. student to benefit from protected and supported time to pursue their scholarly research activities. The fellowship is intended to recognize students with distinguished academic achievement during their early graduate training. These achievements should be evident from a combination of outstanding academic performance in coursework, as well as early scholarly research activities.

Wenqi Zeng is the recipient of the Graduate College Summer Fellowship for summer 2022. This fellowship program provides an opportunity for advanced Ph.D. student to benefit from protected and supported time to pursue their scholarly research activities.

Christine Shea presented "Who Lateralizes Matters" at the Georgetown University Roundtable (virtual), Georgetown University, March 10-13, 2022.

Conference Presentation at National Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language, February 24th-26th, 2022

Perception in Context: How Multilingualism is a Door to New Horizons but a Gatekeeper for Some. Invited speaker, UC Davis Cluster on Language Research, February 23, 2022.

Mentalizing, or reasoning about others’ mental states, is a dynamic social cognitive process that aids in communication and navigating complex social interactions. We examined whether exposure to diverse perspectives, afforded by occupying influential social network positions, predicted bilingual adults’ performances on a behavioral mentalizing rating task in regions of high and low linguistic diversity. We calculated the degree to which respondents’ social network position generally bridged unconnected others (i.e., general betweenness) and specifically bridged language communities (i.e., language between- ness).

Human cognition occurs within social contexts, and nowhere is this more evident than language behavior. Regularly using multiple languages is a globally ubiquitous individual experience that is shaped by social environmental forces, ranging from interpersonal interactions to ambient language exposure. Here, we develop a Systems Framework of Bilingualism, where embedded layers of individual, interpersonal, and ecological sociolinguistic factors jointly predict people’s language behavior.

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference across verb classes, represented here as a difference in formal feature strength.