Student Representation at SNL 2020

Title: Neural representation of syntactic prediction: A simultaneous eye-tracking and EEG study

Research summary: Human brain rapidly integrates linguistic information and makes online prediction about upcoming words as sentences unfold in time. However, it is still unclear when the prediction is formed and what neural features of prediction are activated in the brain. By using a simultaneous eye-tracking and EEG technique and verb bias task, this study found that people's first fixation pattern has shown a significant verb bias effect right after hearing the verb and before the first noun phrase. Also, a greater negativity was elicited by strongly biased verbs 100 ms before the first fixation.

Link for PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ClNvjfogJxPGlC_ddKWG1mmlUkqVkT_B/view?usp=sharing

Link for video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Gm-Aykd6EsyVAY7AvfZLfoGiCb5xs8XX/view?usp=sharing

Presentation Title: Early-life signed language exposure does not impede the development of spoken language: A functional near infrared spectroscopy investigation of phonemic discrimination in cochlear implant (CI) users

Research summary: This study  examined neural activation patterns underlying phonemic discrimination (ability to distinguish phonemes) in individuals with CI who were both: exposed to signed language at different ages and received their CI at different ages. We used an auditory target phoneme discrimination task using an oddball paradigm. Our findings showed that early life language exposure (ASL and/or via CI) was associated with greater activation of left hemisphere language areas that are critically involved in auditory phoneme detection and their right hemisphere homologues. We found no negative impact of early life signed language exposure on spoken language phonemic discrimination ability in CI users. 

The link to presentation pdf: https://sites.udel.edu/shakhlon/cv/files

​Presentation Title: Informative use of "not" is N400 blind

Research Summary: This study investigates how negation is processed when it is used informatively. We conducted an experiment utilizing N400 ERP component and found that N400 is not modulated by the truth value of the negated sentences. Our findings provide new support for the theory that negation is incorporated "late" in sentence processing.

Link for PDF: https://sites.udel.edu/ryanrhodes/files/2020/10/Poster_final.pdf

Link for video: https://youtu.be/7wMK7asGEng