Language and Cognition Lab

• Research Opportunities for Undergraduate Students (Fall 2025-Spring 2026)!

The Language and Cognition group conducts empirical research on how language functions in the mind, brain, and society. Undergraduate research assistants (RAs) will be mentored by graduate students in a supportive lab environment. Over the course of the program, RAs will rotate through three research topics, eventually focusing in depth on one:

1. Cognitive and linguistic changes in typical and atypical aging

2. The role of prosody in resolving ambiguity (e.g., Is the hat or the unicorn purple in “the purple unicorn hat”?)

3. How speakers and learners of Mandarin are perceived—and perceive themselves—as speaking with an accent

RAs will gain hands-on experience in reading and presenting research articles, designing and running linguistic experiments, coding and analyzing data, and contributing to research presentations and discussions in a lab setting. We welcome students from all backgrounds who have a genuine curiosity about how language works in the mind and society.

This opportunity was funded by IU's "Layered-Learning Program for Undergraduate (UG) Researchers".

• We hosted the IU-NTU Symposium on Language, Brain, and Society on October 6 of 2023. Three invited speakers visited us from National Taiwan University, including Te-Hsin Liu (Teaching Chinese as a Second Language), Janice Fon (Linguistics), and Charlene Lee (Linguistics). Three talks from IU speakers were also delivered in this one-day event. The stimulating talks included:

National Taiwan University

• • Te-Hsin Liu: French Prosody Meets Mandarin Tones: Analyzing the Impact on Learners 

  • Charlene Lee: Finding Syntactic Regularities in the ‘Right’ Hemisphere 

  • Janice Fon: Can David really win Goliath? On the effect of phonetic variation on spoken word recognition

Indiana University

• •  Nozomi Tanaka: An experimental investigation of children’s comprehension and production of Japanese relative clauses 

  • Xiao Dong, Fengmin Liu, Monica Nesbitt, Charles Lin: Neutral Tone in Beijing: Reexamining the Utilization of the Neutral Tone in Beijing Professionals 

  • Keiji Iwamoto and Isabelle Darcy: Can pitch be repurposed? Tone language speakers use their pitch sensitivity to make segmental distinctions in a second language

• Dr. Charles Lin signed a Memorandum of Understanding with National Chung-Cheng University (Chiayi, Taiwan) in June of 2023 as a formal agreement to promote research collaborations between Language and Cognition Lab (IUB) and the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences in National Chung Cheng University (RCHSS, CCU). We have established the following mutual goals:

  • co-operation on academic programs;

  • the development of joint research activities;

  • doctoral student training and development;

  • student exchange and/or visiting programs;

  • the exchange of information, including the results of teaching and research collaboration;

  • any other activities viewed to be mutually beneficial.

• We welcomed the new PhD students Yutong Feng and Ari I to EALC. Yutong is partiucalrly interested in Chinese classifiers and second language acquisition, and Ari has been fascinated by the genesis of tones.

• Do people think differently in Chinese and English? This is one of the key questions we ask in our lab. Prof. Lin gave an invited talk on how the differences in Chinese and English show up in translational syntax in Princeton University in October of 2022. This is work that he has been doing with computational linguists from our lab--He Zhou and Hai Hu.

• Prof. Lin gave a keynote talk at the National Conference of Linguistics in National Cheng-Chi University on "Syntactic Complexity and Dependency in Translational Thinking" on October 28, 2022.

• We hosted the 34th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics on IU campus from 9/23 to 9/25. The theme of this year's conference was "Data and Methods in Chinese Linguistics". We also hosted a pre-conference workshop on Data and Methods. Thanks to all of those who participated, we had a wonderful time meeting new and old friends!