The laboratory focuses on experimental studies of how language is computed in the brain. We combine linguistic theory with cognitive models, electrophysiological measures, and behavior, and probe the mind by collecting electrophysiological signals of what's in there.
April 1, 2026
Neemias defends his thesis!
Neemias defends his thesis!
Neemias Souza Filho successfully defended his thesis "PREDICTABILITY AND PRAGMATICS IN NEGATION" today. Here with his committee and Daiki, who defended his own thesis the day before! Congratulations to the newly minted PhDs.
April 1, 2026
Chao Han publishes his dissertation research
Chao Han publishes his dissertation research
Chao' thesis research shows that varying the standards in a phoneme category MMN experiment does not produce a symbolic memory trace of the standards (contrary to the predictions of Phillips et al 2000), and that the MMN in this type of paradigm depends on participants forming a statistical representation of the stimuli they hear. It will appear in an EJN Special Issue "The Neuronal Basis of Mismatch Negativity (MMN) and Its Clinical Applications: A Special Collection in Honour of Professor Risto Näätänen (1939–2023)."
January 2026
Lab relocated to Wolf Hall, on The Green
Lab relocated to Wolf Hall, on The Green
We're now on The Green, first floor of Wolf Hall, inside Suite 123, room 122A.
September 2025
Jacob Presents at SNL 2025!
Jacob Presents at SNL 2025!
Jacob presented our study: 'Separating Acoustics from Phonology with Rotated Speech'
March 2025
EPL Visits HSP 2025!
EPL Visits HSP 2025!
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'
January 2025
Daiki Asami publishes lab study on truth value in negation processing.
Daiki Asami publishes lab study on truth value in negation processing.
Under the lead of Daiki Asami, a lab group published a study of 2-step negation processing that removed a priming confound typically present in such studies, using comparative constructions. To our surprise, this removed the typical N400 crossover interaction, an instead what emerged was a main effect of truth-value in a LAN component. Read more here:
Asami, D., Han, C., Burger, J., Dunlop, D., Lu, Y., Yahya, E., Morad, M., Zhao, C., & Hestvik, A. (2025). “Negation-blind” N400 effect disappears when lexical priming is controlled. Experiments in Linguistic Meaning, 3, 19–31. https://doi.org/10.3765/ELM.3.5800
January 2024
Chao Han is a Postdoc!
Chao Han is a Postdoc!
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!
June 2023
Lab organizes PhonolEEGy 2 conference
Lab organizes PhonolEEGy 2 conference
The lab is a co-organizer of the international conference PhonolEEGy 2, supported by the National Science Foundations, see
https://sites.udel.edu/phonoleegy2/
Dec 2022
Chao Han defends his dissertation
Chao Han defends his dissertation
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)
Feb 2022
Ryan Rhodes publishes phoneme paper from his thesis work
Ryan Rhodes publishes phoneme paper from his thesis work
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
Dec 2021
Language impaired kids don't predict syntax
Language impaired kids don't predict syntax
In a new paper coming out, we show that language impaired children don't predict syntax the way typically developing children do.
May 2021
May 2021
Chinese syntax in the brain
Chinese syntax in the brain
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
July 2020
Bilge Palaz publishes in Psychophysiology
Bilge Palaz publishes in Psychophysiology
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
March 2020
Enes Avcu publishes in GLOSSA
Enes Avcu publishes in GLOSSA
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.
January 2020
Two labs publish joint paper in Brain Research
Two labs publish joint paper in Brain Research
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
August 2019
EPL goes to Australia for ICPhS 2019
EPL goes to Australia for ICPhS 2019
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!
July 2019
Enes Avcu and Ryan Rhodes got postdocs!
Enes Avcu and Ryan Rhodes got postdocs!
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!
April 2019
Bilingual speech perception
Bilingual speech perception
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
March 2019
Phonological Memory Traces
Phonological Memory Traces
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
October 2018
NELS and AMP
NELS and AMP
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!
September 2018
Society for the Neurobiology of Language
Society for the Neurobiology of Language
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).
Contact Info
Contact Info
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
Wolf Hall, room 122A
University of Delaware, 105 The Green,
Newark, DE, 19716.
Phone: 302-831-7007
Email: epl.udel@gmail.com.
Report abuse