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About us
About us
The Neurolinguistics Lab studies the relationship between language and the brain, focusing on the structural and conceptual aspects of language as well as on the interaction between language and other cognitive functions in healthy adults. Projects in our lab usually adopt the ERP and fMRI techniques and center around the following topics:
(1) Hierarchical structure
It is widely believed that hierarchical structure differentiates human language from other animal communication systems. We are interested in exploring the representation and processing of hierarchical structure in both the syntactic and conceptual domains.
(2) Dependency relationship
Dependency relationship is a crucial element in language and can be observed at multiple levels. We are particularly interested in the dependency relationship between a classifier and its associated nouns in Mandarin, a language with the most complex classifier system in the world.
(3) Categorization
Humans categorize things with or without the influence of language. For example, almost everyone in the world can easily group animals as a category, but only speakers with a certain classifier system in their language would classify “long objects” as a group (e.g. Mandarin). We are interested in figuring out what linguistic categorization is and how linguistic and non-linguistic categorizations differ from each other.
(4) Language and other cognitive functions
Language is an independent system but it also interacts with other cognitive functions to various degrees. Projects in our lab look into different “interfaces” between language and non-linguistic functions, such as executive functions (especially language mixing/switching), music, emotion, etc.
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