Dr. Qi Cheng and Graduate Student Yuting Zhang attend the Society for the Neurobiology of Language 2025

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In September, Dr. Qi Cheng and graduate student Yuting Zhang attended the Society for the Neurobiology of Language 2025. They presented a poster titled “Locating visual mismatch responses by hearing signers of ASL using MEG.”

Yuting’s Video about the Conference
Graduate student Yuting Zhang made and shared a video using Chinese Sign Language (CSL) on Chinese social media to celebrate the 2025 International Week of the Deaf. In the video, Yuting shared her observations from the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL) conference, including how the conference was made accessible through sign language interpreters, and how deaf professors and researchers used sign language to give keynote talks and present their research. This is to show the importance of sign language and empower the Deaf community with the message: “Deaf people can do anything.”

Fall Quarter NLL Meeting Schedule

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This Fall Quarter, the NLL will meet in Guggenheim 415L every other Friday at either 1:30 or 3:30pm. The meeting schedule is below.

10/17 at 3:30pm 1. Frederick will give a conlang report and ideas for a sign language conlang; 2. We will have a discussion about creating professional websites
10/31 at 3:30pm Frederick will give an eyetracking glasses demo
11/14 at 1:30pm Yoojin will present her GP2 progress: Exploring 1.5 generation Korean-American Language Use
12/5 at 1:30pm Yuting will present dissertation ideas, including sign language perception, processing, and learning

Dr. Julia Herschensohn and PhD student Yoojin Oh present at the International Symposium on Bilingualism

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In June 2025, Dr. Julia Herschensohn and PhD student Yoojin Oh attended the International Symposium on Bilingualism in San Sebastian, Spain. Dr. Herschensohn and coauthors Ana Fernández-Dobao and Stefana Vukadinovich presented “Input overrides attrition: Nominal and verbal agreement of heritage Spanish-English bilinguals in dual immersion.”

Yoojin Oh presented “Dynamic Control in Korean-English Bilinguals: L1 Inhibition Across Linguistic Tasks and Complexity,” her first Generals Paper and a collaborative project with coauthors Dr. Qi Cheng and Dr. Chuchu Li from UCSD. Stay tuned for a future manuscript!

Subaward R01 grant from NIH

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Dr. Cheng received a subaward as the co-I of an R01 award ($1,306,122 direct cost) from National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) granted to PI Dr. Chuchu Li (UCSD Psychiatry). This five-year project will examine unimodal and bimodal bilingual cognitive control across comprehension and production to reveal the role of modality difference on bilingual cognitive control.

New publication on Language Learning & Development

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A new paper titled ‘American Sign Language basic clause comprehension strategies used by late first-language learners: plausibility, animacy, and linguistic structure’ is published on Language Learning and Development by Dr. Cheng and coauthor Dr. Mayberry. This paper examined late L1 ASL signers’ use of extra-linguistic cues in different linguistic structures and found a graded representation of basic syntactic structures that is susceptible to semantic influence. Check out the open-access paper here!

Cheng, Q., & Mayberry, R. I. (2025). American Sign Language basic clause comprehension strategies used by late first-language learners: Plausibility, animacy, and linguistic structure. Language Learning and Development, 1-19. [link]

 

Spring 2025 Lab Meeting Schedule

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This Winter Quarter, the NLL will meet in Guggenheim 415L every other Friday at 12:30 am. The meeting schedule is below.

4/18 Qi & Yuting on the MEG ASL visual mismatch study
5/2 Pacific Northwest Sign Language Research meeting (w/ Dr. Kathleen Hall’s group from UBC)
3/16 Yuting on her CSL field trip
5/30 Yoojin ISM poster practice on Korean-English bilingual switch

R21 grant from NIH

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Dr. Cheng (PI) and collaborator Dr. Christina Zhao (co-I) received a National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) Early Career Research(ECR) Award (R21, $375,000 total direct) to support a three-year project on examining the ASL visual mismatch responses using MEG and MRI with hearing and deaf signers.

Winter 2025 Lab Meeting Schedule

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This Winter Quarter, the NLL will meet in Guggenheim 415L every other Friday at 11:30 am. The meeting schedule is below.

1/24 Qi will present on visual statistical learning of ASL handshapes by hearing signers
2/7 Caitlyn et al. will present on ASL stories annotation using ELAN
2/21 Yoojin will present on her GP2 proposal
3/7 Ty et al will present on Pupil Labs eye-tracking glasses

Dr. Qi Cheng and Graduate Student Yuting Zhang present at BUCLD

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Dr. Qi Cheng and and Graduate Student Yuting Zhang presented at the 49th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) in November. Zhang and Cheng

Dr. Cheng’s presentation was titled “American Sign Language transitive sentence comprehension strategies by deaf English-ASL bilinguals: the role of early language environment.”

Zhang’s presentation, co-authored with Hao Lin and Qi Cheng, was titled “Structure flexibility in description of transitive events among native and late CSL signers.” Zhang was also awarded a $350 Paula Menyuk Award and a $300 GPSS travel grant.