Vicky Lai

Real name:

Vicky Lai

Assistant Professor, Cognition/Neural Systems

Assistant Professor of the Cognitive Science Program

Faculty of the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Graduate Interdisciplinary Program

Courtesy appointment in Department of Linguistics

Director, Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory

Email:

tzuyinlai@email.arizona.edu

Telephone:

(520) 621-3443

Office:

Psychology 509

http://neurolang.lab.arizona.edu/

Research Interests:

Dr. Lai uses behavioral and neuroscience (brainwave activities, neural imaging) methods to study meaning and language in context. Specifically, there are three lines of research: (1) Figurative language: How do people process metaphorical language? What is the role of metaphor in embodied view of language? What are the social-affective functions of metaphors? (2) Emotion and language: How is emotion encoded in language? How do language activities such as reading give rise to emotion? How do readers’ mood states influence meaning making in language? (3) Language and thought in bilinguals: Do people who speak two languages that have conflicting semantic constructs perceive and reason about the world differently?

Selected Publications:

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. & Huettig, F. (2016). When Prediction is Fulfilled: Insight from Emotion Processing. Neuropsychologia, 85,110-117.

Samur, D., Lai, V. T., Hagoort, P., & Willems, R. (2015). Emotional Context Modulates Embodied Metaphor Comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 78, 108-114.

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., Hagoort, P., & Casasanto D. (2012). Affective Primacy vs. Cognitive Primacy: Dissolving the Debate. Frontiers in Cognitive Science. 3, 243.

Kim, A. & Lai V. T. (2012). Rapid Interactions between Lexical Semantic and Word Form Analysis during Word Recognition in Context: Evidence from ERPs. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 24(5), 1104–1112.

Bethard, S., Lai V. T., & Martin, J. (2009). Topic Model Analysis of Metaphor Frequency for Psycholinguistic Stimuli. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), pp. 9-16.

Lai, V. T., Curran, T., & Menn, L. (2009). Comprehending Conventional and Novel Metaphors: An ERP study. Brain Research, 1284, 145-155.

Courses Taught:

PSYC/LING/SLAT 542 Topics in Psycholinguistics (Fall 2016)

PSY 496F Cognitive Psychology (Spring 2017)

Research Area:

Healthy Minds

Healthy Brains

Research Program:

CNS