Catherine Caldwell-Harris, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Psychology Department of Psychology, Boston University 64 Cummington St Boston MA 02215 Email: charris@bu.edu Office: Rm 123 Phone: (617) 353-2956 Lab: Rms 127-129 Information about Research Internship (see also Lab page) Curriculum vitae (cv with links to publications, html)

I was trained at UC San Diego, 1985-1991, where I learned from Elizabeth Bates, Jeff Elman, David Rumelhart, Rama Ramachandran, Ronald Langacker, Patricia Churchland and (via CMU) Brian MacWhinney and Jay McClelland (and of course many other wonderful teachers and scholars). I have been a faculty member at BU since 1991.

My research interests are broad, encompassing diverse aspects of language processing, including second language acquisition, emotional aspects of language, and word recognition. I am the first researcher to document that emotion words elicit larger skin conductance responses in a first language than in a second (see paper in Applied Psycholinguistics, pdf). I am currently studying emotional reactivity in the U.S. for speakers who grew up speaking Russian, Mandarin, or Spanish, as well as English native speakers who learned Russian as a foreign langauge (see powerpoint presentation for overview of this research and forthcoming paper on lying in native vs. foreign language). See also a recent powerpoint which discusses the role of motivation in second language acquisition. I am also interested in how units larger than single words are important for fluency and efficiency in all types of language processing (for both first and second language).

In word recognition, I have expertise in an intriguing visual/cognition illusion called repetition blindness. I have shown how illusory words can be created by embedding word fragments in the visual stream, as in "pain grain avy" (leads to report of "gravy" (see, for example, my paper with Alison Morris, in pdf). I have used repetition blindness and the same/difference task to investigate how diacritic letters are represented in Turkish. With German colleagues Martin Heil and Michael Niedeggen I have used this technique to explore consciousness (see our paper in Neuroreport). We conclude that what viewers perceive is more important for subsequent brain states and processing than what is actually in the visual input. A new model of repetition blindness and orthographic priming appeared in 2009 in the journal Cognitive Psychology.

In my cross-cultural research, I am the originator (with Ayse Aycicegi) of the Personality-Culture Clash hypothesis. We propose that mental health is facilitated by having a personality in tune with cultural values.

MISC

• At Boston University I currently supervise 3 doctoral students: Hui-wen Cheng, Jimmy Tong and Naomi Berlove.
• Speaking engagements: In additino to topics listed in my current and prior conferences list, I am available to speak on advertising to Bilingual populations, processing simplified and traditional Chinese (abstract), and current perspectives on evolutionary psychology.
• The great minds at MIT linguistics wondered, on October 19, 2007, "Have we all been wrong?" See notes from Hockett's review of Chomsky's linguistic theory (html) from his State of the Art book 4 decades ago.
• Or if you want child language acquisition data, see the Bates and MacWhinney classic 1987 paper (pdf), only 20 years old...

Why so slow? Video of Virginia Valian's lecture at MIT