Dr. Qi Cheng and her collaborator Dr. Christina Zhao from UW SPHSC recently received a $40,000 grant from UW Royalty Research Fund (RRF) to study visual mismatch responses among deaf and hearing signers. You can read more about the project here: ASL mismatch responses in MEG
We are looking for deaf and hearing proficient signers to join our study! Please fill in the form here if you are interested: tinyurl.com/aslmeg
First year graduate student Yuting Zhang recently presented her work on Hong Kong Sign Language compounds at the 29th Annual Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL‐29) at Macau University of Science and Technology. She was also selected as one of the four finalists for the ‘Young Scholar Award’ competition. Congratulations, Yuting!
Undergraduate RAs Claire, Charisse, Gillian, and Xinyue have been taking EEG trainings with Dr. Mark Pettet from UW Psychology during spring quarter. photo credit Victoria Hennessy.
Dr. Qi Cheng has a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)! You can read it here. More details of the study can be found at the project webpage: How does early language experience shape the brain?
Cheng, Q., Roth, A., Halgren, E., Klein, D., Chen, J. K., & Mayberry, R. I. (2023). Restricted language access during childhood affects adult brain structure in selective language regions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(7), e2215423120.
Our first year graduate student, Yuting Zhang, just presented a poster on her masters thesis, ‘Compounding in Hong Kong Sign Language’, at the High Desert Linguistics Society (HDLS) in Albuquerque, New Mexico!
Our undergraduate RA, Jessie Zeng, just presented a poster on ‘Grammatical attainment by deaf English learners with and without early sign language support as compared to hearing L2 learners’ at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) on Nov. 5th! Great job, Jessie!
We had so much fun at the DeafNation Expo Seattle on Nov. 5 at Seattle Center! The lab had a booth with study promotion materials (flyers, intake forms, swags) right next to the UW ASL program booth. A lot of people stopped by our booth and learned about our research, and many signed up to participate in future studies. Hope to connect with the community again soon!
Happy Fall quarter! We will be meeting in person at GUG415L (the ling conference room) for our bi-weekly lab meetings, and all are welcome! Here is our tentative schedule for this quarter:
Qi will be presenting a talk entitled ‘Processing and anatomical outcomes when early language input is insufficient: evidence from deaf individuals with early language deprivation’ at a SNL symposium co-organized with Dr. Marina Bedny (JHU), ‘Plasticity in a language-ready brain: complementary evidence from developmental deafness, blindness, and varied language experience across modalities’, on Oct. 6, at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel. Here is the link to the symposium: https://www.neurolang.org/symposia/?id=29
Qi will also present a poster on the ASL mismatch responses in MEG, co-authored with Dr. Christina Zhao (UW SPHSC), ‘Localizing visual mismatch responses in American Sign Language (ASL) using MEG’, at the same venue on October 8, 3:15 pm EDT. Read more about the project here: https://sites.uw.edu/nllab/research/mmr_meg/
Qi, Monica, and Karen are presenting a poster on the ASL animacy vs. word order study at the 14th International Conference on Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (September 27-30, 2022). The conference will happen in Oasaka, Japan, but we will be presenting virtually. The title of the presentation is: ‘When animacy overshadows word order in sentence comprehension: The case of late first-language acquisition of American Sign Language’. For more information of this study, see https://sites.uw.edu/nllab/research/asl_word_order/