Welcome to the Experimental Psycholinguistics Lab at UD (the EPL)! Our lab studies language and language processing by linking linguistic theory, cognitive models, electrophysiological measures, and behavior. Our goal is to investigate the psychological reality of structures and representations from modern linguistic theory as they apply to language processing, prediction, and learning.
Learn more about what we do, volunteer in the lab, or participate a study!
Our lab had two posters about negation processing at HSP 2025!
Aziz and Jacob showed off our study: 'YODA: English as SOV preserves N400 evidence for 2-stage negation processing'
Neemias presented research relating to his dissertation: 'Pragmatics mitigates the cost of negation: A first step toward investigating predictability effects in negation processing'
We published ''Negation-blind' N400 effect disappears when lexical priming is controlled' in Experiments in Linguistic Meaning!
Full text: (PDF) 'Negation-blind' N400 effect disappears when lexical priming is controlled
Lab manager Chao Han has landed a postdoctoral position!
Chao will be working at the University of Toronto Scarborough in the Computation and Psycholinguistics Laboratory.
We will miss you Chao! We wish you lots of luck!
The lab is a co-organizer of the international conference PhonolEEGy 2, supported by the National Science Foundations, see
https://sites.udel.edu/phonoleegy2/
Chao defended his thesis on Dec 9, 2022--about within-category MMN with varying standards.
The nature of speech representation in varying-standard MMN paradigm (udel.edu)
A paper co-authored with Ryan's lab group shows that a late-latency mismatch response in the brain is insensitive to a within-category phonetic difference between standards and deviants. This supports the view that varying standards within-category leads to a phonemic memory trace, which does not encode phonetic gradience, thus providing evidence about the nature of phoneme representations in memory.
Rhodes, R., Avcu, E., Han, C., & Hestvik, A. (2022). Auditory predictions are phonological when phonetic information is variable. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2022.2043395
In a new paper coming out, we show that language impaired children don't predict syntax the way typically developing children do.
Renee Dong shows that Chinese Topic constructions are sensitive to island constraints, providing evidence that Chinese has syntactic movement.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.650659/full
N400 component
The study demonstrates that negation is sometimes not contributing to truth-value computation during the early stages of sentence comprehension, whether it is pragmatically licensed or not. Congratulations, Bilge!
Palaz, B., Rhodes, R., & Hestvik, A. (2020). Informative use of “not” is N400-blind. Psychophysiology. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13676
Enes has gotten a paper based on a behavioral study from his thesis accepted for publication in GLOSSA (together with Arild Hestvik). It uses Signal Detection theory to measure sensitivity to grammatical rules in an artificial grammar learning experiment.
Arild Hestvik and Karthik Durvasula (PhD UD 2015) collaborated with Hiromu Sakai's lab at Waseda University, including Yasuaki Shinohara and Rinus Verdonschoot, and confirmed a prediction about underspecification patterns in Japanese.
Hestvik, A., Shinohara, Y., Durvasula, K., Verdonschot, R. G., & Sakai, H. (2020). Abstractness of human speech sound representations. Brain Research, 146664. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2020.146664
Several UD graduate students and faculty presented research at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Among them were Ryan Rhodes from the EPL, presenting a talk titled Ad Hoc Phonetic Categorization and Prediction.
Meanwhile in Delaware, undergraduate Summer Scholar Lena Herman presented a poster at the UD Summer Scholars' Symposium titled Ad Hoc Phonetic Representations. Great job, Lena!
Lab members Enes Avcu and Ryan Rhodes have landed postdoctoral positions!
Enes will be working with David Gow in The Gow Lab at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. Ryan will be working with the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS).
We are excited and proud of our students and wish them lots of luck!
Together with our collaborating lab at the CUNY Graduate Center, Arild is publishing a paper in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition together with Hia Datta (Molloy College), Valerie Shafer (lab director at the CUNY Grad Center lab), Nancy Vidal (Iona College), Carol Tessel (Florida Atlantic University), Miwako Hisago (University of CT), and Marcin Wroblewski (Pacific University Oregon) which shows that children who learn a 2nd language before 5 years of age basically become native speakers of that language. However, we also show that bilingual speakers have an advantage over monolinguals with respect to attentional mechanisms during language perception.
Datta, H., Hestvik, A., Vidal, N., Tessel, C., Hisagi, M., & Shafer, V. L. (2019). Automaticity of speech processing in early bilingual adults and children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000099
Ryan Rhodes, Chao Han, and Arild Hestvik published a paper in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics that investigates the content of representations generated in auditory sensory memory in response to varying input. Using the varying standards MMN paradigm, we measure the brain's 'surprise' response to an across-category difference (/t/ vs /d/). We find no difference in brain response, regardless of the distance between the standards and deviant, indicating that the representation generated in sensory memory does not maintain fine-grained phonetic information.
Rhodes, R., Han, C., & Hestvik, A. (2019). Phonological memory traces do not contain phonetic information. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01728-1
Enes Avcu and Ryan Rhodes presented a poster titled Neural Underpinnings of Phonotactic Rule Learning at the 49th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society and the Annual Meeting of Phonology. They find a P300 to phonotactic rule violation 500ms after word onset - exactly 300ms after the earliest point in the word that the phonotactic violation is detectable!
Enes Avcu and Ryan Rhodes presented posters at SNL in Quebec. Phonotactic Rule-Learning Without Semantics: An EEG study investigates the neural signature of phonotactic rule violation detection when learners are exposed to the phonotactic patterns in isolation (without word-meaning pairings). Phonetic Content of Auditory Representations finds fine-grained phonetic detail in the representation generated by auditory sensory memory when the encountered sounds vary in some dimension unrelated to the phonological category assignment (i.e. pitch).
Please contact us if you would like to learn more about our research, help out in the lab, or participate in a study! We would love to hear from you. Email us at epl.udel@gmail.com.
The EPL is located slightly off-campus at 800 Barksdale Road, Suite 102. If you drive, free parking is available in a public parking lot with an entrance from Barksdale Road.
Experimental Psycholinguistics Lab
800 Barksdale Road, Newark DE 19711
Phone: 302-831-7007
Email: epl.udel@gmail.com.
