Activities

Languages are highly patterned abstract systems, shared within communities of speakers. Where do their patterns come from, and why are some characteristics apparently universal across languages? The birth of a new, natural human language provides an opportunity to observe how such structure arises. We consider the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), a young, urban sign language that emerged from within a community of children brought together in an educational setting in the 1970s. Originating in gestural communication among 50 children, NSL is a rich, natural language with over 1500 users today. By taking an apparent time approach, comparing present-day age cohorts, we can capture patterns of change in the linguistic structure of the language as it was transmitted over successive generations of learners. Read More

Title: Subcortical pathways in the human auditory system

Abstract: The human auditory pathway is comprised of multiple subcortical nuclei en route to auditory cortex. Each of these auditory structures receives top-down auditory inputs as well as multisensory and context-dependent inputs from other sensory and cognitive brain regions (and vice versa). While these neural connections are crucial for human behaviors such as speech communication and music, most of our knowledge of subcortical auditory pathways comes from animal models. In this talk I will discuss my work mapping the human subcortical auditory system using ultra-high resolution functional MRI, diffusion MRI tractography, and anatomical MRI with post mortem and in vivo human datasets. Further, I will show recent and ongoing work characterizing auditory cortical connections with dorsal striatum and their contribution to human auditory category learning. Overall, I aim to expand beyond our cortical-centric view of the human auditory system by better understanding subcortical auditory connections and their contributions to auditory processing. Read More

Title: The timing of the cognitive processes underlying bilingualism and the perception of foreign accents: Evidence from mouse tracking

The mouse-tracking paradigm allows researchers to better understand how cognitive processes unfold over time by recording participants’ responses using a computer mouse. In this talk, I will present a diverse set of cognitive experiments in which I used the mouse-tracking paradigm for data collection. Read More