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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? Show Less
VOSviewer
Courses
- NBLNeural Basis of Language
- CNAGMBCognitive Neuroscience: A Guide to Mind and Brain
- ITCSIssues and Themes in Cognitive Science
- TPTopics in Psycholinguistics
- LTACPNPLanguage and Thought: A Cognitive Psychology/Neuroscience Perspective
Grants
- Learning Science Concepts Through Metaphor Comprehension, Production, and Conversation: Behavioral, Neural and Artificial Intelligence Measures
Principal Investigator (PI)
2022
$352.8K
Active - Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effects of Context on Emotional Word Processing in Healthy younger and older adults
Principal Investigator (PI)
2022
$17.1K
Active - Participant Support
Principal Investigator (PI)
2022
$2.1K
Active - Emotional Words in Contexts and Healthy Aging - Phase II
Principal Investigator (PI)
2021
$460.5
- Emotional Language and Healthy Aging
Principal Investigator (PI)
2020
$460.5
- Neural Correlates of Visual Metaphor Processing Part II
Principal Investigator (PI)
2020
$460.5
- Neural Correlates of Visual Metaphor Processing
Principal Investigator (PI)
2019
$460.5
- Learning Science Through Metaphors - Phase II (WAESO)
Principal Investigator (PI)
2018
$460.5
- Learning Science Through Metaphors (WAESO)
Principal Investigator (PI)
2017
$378.0
News
- How your mood affects the way you process language
2023
- As COVID-19 Disrupts Lives, Words Matter
2020
- How the Brain Finds Meaning in Metaphor
2019
Publications (28)
Recent
- Predictability and decomposability separately contribute to compositional processing of idiomatic language
2023
- Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge
2022
- Cursed Concepts: New insights on combinatorial processing from ERP correlates of swearing in context
2022
- Minding the manner: Attention to motion events in Turkish–Dutch early bilinguals. Language and Cognition
2022
- Do all facial emojis communicate emotion? The impact of facial emojis on perceived sender emotion and text processing.
2022
- The Comprehension of Irony in High and Low Emotional Contexts
2021
- Social acquisition context matters: Increased neural responses for native but not non-native taboo words
2021
- The Phishing Email Suspicion Test (PEST) a lab-based task for evaluating the cognitive mechanisms of phishing detection
2020
- Personality traits and emotional word recognition: An ERP study
2020
- The mental representation and social aspect of expressives
2020
- Concrete Processing of Action Metaphors: Evidence from ERP
2019
- Effects of motion speed in action representations
2017
- Toward Semantics in the Wild: Activation to Manipulable Nouns in Naturalistic Reading
2016
- The grounding of temporal metaphors
2016
- Editorial: The Metaphorical Brain
2016
- When prediction is fulfilled: Insight from emotion processing
2016
- Familiarity differentially affects right hemisphere contributions to processing metaphors and literals
2015
- Feel between the lines: implied emotion in sentence comprehension
2015
- Emotional context modulates embodied metaphor comprehension
2015
- Thinking-for-speaking in early and late bilinguals
2014
- The immediate and chronic influence of spatio-temporal metaphors on the mental representations of time in english, mandarin, and mandarin-english speakers
2013
- ERP evidence for conceptual mappings and comparison processes during the comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors
2013
- Rapid Interactions between Lexical Semantic and Word Form Analysis during Word Recognition in Context: Evidence from ERPs
2012
- Affective Primacy vs. Cognitive Primacy: Dissolving the Debate
2012
- Affective and Non-Affective Meaning in Words and Pictures
2011
- Crowdsourcing and Language Studies: The New Generation of Linguistic Data
2010
- Comprehending conventional and novel metaphors: an ERP study
2009