Vicky Lai
Vicky Lai
Assistant Professor, Cognition & Neural Systems
Assistant Professor, Cognitive Science Program
Faculty, Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Program
Courtesy Faculty, Department of Linguistics
Director, Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory

Research Interests:
Selected Publications:
- Lai, V. T., Hubbard, R., Ku, L, & Pfeifer, V. (To appear). Electrophysiology of non-literal language. In Language Electrified, Techniques, Methods, Applications, and Future Perspectives in the Neurophysiological Investigation of Language [Computations] edited by Grimaldi, M., Shtyrov, Y., Brattico, E. Springer.
- Kamenetski, A., Lai, V. T., & Flecken, M. (2022). Minding the manner: Attention to motion events in Turkish–Dutch early bilinguals. Language and Cognition, 1-23.
- Ku, L.-C., Allen, J. B. B., & Lai, V.T. (2022). Attention and regulation during emotional word comprehension in older adults: Evidence from event-related potentials and brain oscillations. Brain & Language, 227, 105086.
- Pfeifer, V. A., & Lai, V. T. (2021). The comprehension of irony in high and low emotional contexts. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale.
- Donahoo, S. & Lai, V. T. (2020). The mental representation and social aspect of expressives. Cognition and Emotion, 1-16.
- Lai, V. T. & Desai, R. H. (2016). The Grounding of Temporal Metaphors. Cortex, 76, 43-45.
- Coulson, S., & Lai, V. T. (2016). Editorial: The Metaphorical Brain. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 699.
- Lai, V. T., van Dam, W., Conant, L. L., Binder, J. R., & Desai, R. H. (2015). Familiarity Differentially Affects Right Hemisphere Contributions to Processing Metaphors and Literals. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 44.
- Lai, V. T., Willems, R. M., & Hagoort, P. (2015). Feel between the Lines: Implied Emotion in Sentence Comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 27(8), 1528–1541.
- Lai, V. T., Rodriguez, G. G., & Narasimhan, B. (2014). Thinking-for-speaking in Early and Late Bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17(01), 139–152.
- Lai, V. T. & Curran, T. (2013). ERP Evidence for Conceptual Mappings and Comparison Processes during the Comprehension of Conventional and Novel Metaphors. Brain and Language, 127, 484–496.
- Lai, V. T., & Boroditsky, L. (2013). The Immediate and Chronic Influence of Spatio-temporal Metaphors on the Mental Representations of Time in English, Mandarin, and Mandarin-English speakers. Frontiers in Cultural Psychology, 4, 142.
- Lai, V. T., Curran, T., & Menn, L. (2009). Comprehending Conventional and Novel Metaphors: An ERP study. Brain Research, 1284, 145-155.
Courses Taught:
- PSY 300 – Intro to Cognitive Neuroscience - A Guide to Mind and Brain (2023)
- PSYS 407 - Language and Thought (2023)
- NSCS 320 – Issues/Themes in Cognitive Science (2022)
- PSY 530 – Neural Basis of Language (2021)
- PSY 496F - Cognitive Psychology: Seminar (2017)
*Year listed indicates when this individual last taught the specified course.
Updated: 11/13/23