Catherine L. Caldwell-Harris, Ph.D.

Academic Appointment

Department of Psychology, Boston University: Assistant Professor, 1991- 2003; Associate, 2003- present

Education

Ph.D., Cognitive Science and Psychology, University of California, San Diego, August 1991. Dissertation title: Parallel Distributed Processing Models and Metaphors for Language and Development.

B.A., Psychology cum laude, Harvard University, March 1985

Grants and Awards

• 2007-2008 Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, Advantages and Disadvantages of Processing Simplified and Traditional Chinese Scripts, $20,000
• 2003 Istanbul University Social Science Award for outstanding contribution in Psychology (with Ayse Aycicegi and Wayne Dinn)
• "2000 Young Investigator" awarded by the APA Division of Experimental Psychology (award for best paper in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance; with Alison Morris)
• "Orbitofrontal Dysfunction: A Neurobehavioral Continuum," NIMH R03, Funded for two years 1/15/99- 12/31/00, $140,000.
• "Coarse Coding and the Lexicon," McDonnel-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience, 1994-1996, $60,000.
• National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, 1986 - 1989
• Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute at Stanford, 1987 Fellowship

Research Program

My graduate training and most enduring interest has been the intersection between cognition and language. In the last 8 years I have investigated how skin conductance responsiveness varies depending on whether words are presented in bilinguals' first or second language. I have conducted bilingualism studies on a variety of languages, including Spanish, Turkish, Russian and Mandarin. This pursuit has caused me to develop new research projects in cross-cultural psychology, some of which include comparisons of personality and psychopathology. I have also studied visual word recognition and orthographic processing using a variety of techniques such as lexical decision, the same/different task, and repetition blindness. A new model of repetition blindness and orthographic priming is forthcoming from Cognitive Psychology.

Caldwell-Harris, C. L., & Morris, A. L. (under review).  Fast Pairs:  A visual word recognition paradigm for measuring entrenchment, top-down effects, and subjective phenomenology. Journal of Consciousness and Cognition.

Aycicegi-Dinn, A., & Caldwell-Harris, C.L. (under review). Variations in Individualism-Collectivism among Turkish Urban and Rural Residents and Immigrants to North America. International Journal of Psychology.

Morris, A.L., Caldwell-Harris, C.L., & Aycicegi, A. (in prep). Explicit and implicit measures of repetition blindness.

Conference Presentations

Caldwell-Harris, C.L., LoTempio, E., Jordan, C., & Ramanayake, N. (2008). Religious non-belief/belief explained by intellectual orientation and childhood socialization. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, Boston, August 14-17.

Berant, J.B., Edelman, S., & Caldwell-Harris, C.L. (2008). Tracks in the mind: Differential entrenchment of common and rare liturgical and everyday multiword phrases in religious and secular hebrew speakers. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Washington, D.C., July 2008.

Aycicegi-Dinn, A., & Caldwell-Harris, C.L. (2008). Emotion and lying in a non-native language. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston, March 14.

Dahlen, K., & Caldwell-Harris, C.L. (2007). Hearing yourself think: Vocal and subvocal rehearsal in foreign language learning. To be presented at the Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, MA (November).

Tong, J., & Caldwell-Harris, C.L. (2007). Bilinguals sweating in the lab: "Stop That" more arousing in L1, "I love you" in L2. Presented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, Long Beach, CA, November 15-18.

Gross, V, Caldwell-Harris, C.L., Neargarder, S., Cronin-Golomb, A. (2007). Pop-out effects in color-graphemic synesthesia. Presented to the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, New York, NY.

Caldwell-Harris, C.L., Staroselsky, M., Vasilyeva, N, Rukovets, V. (2007). Psychophysiological studies of emotional arousal to bilingual speakers' first and second languages. Presented to the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, New York, NY.

Caldwell-Harris, C.L., Sanchez, N., Ventura, B., Angun, C., Aycicegi-Dinn, A. (2007). Preferring to lie in L1 vs L2: Is emotionality or proficiency more important? Annual Meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Washington DC

Caldwell-Harris, C.L. & Morris, A.L. (2007). Quantifying strength of entrenchment via perceptual errors in reading "card credit" and "code zip". Presented at the Eleventh International Conference on Cognitive and Neural Systems, Boston University, Boston MA.

Ryvkin, I., Harris, C.L., Obler, L. (2006). L2 Sentence Processing in Noise. Rovereto Workshop on Bilingualism - Functional and Neural Perspectives.

Harris, C.L. (2006). Reactions to emotional language in English-Russian bilingual speakers. Presented at the Second Biennial Conference on Cognitive Science, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Niedeggen, M., Heil, M., Harris, C.L. (2005).The fate of the loser in the competition of real and illusory words. Presented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, Toronto, November 10-13.

Harris, C.L., Sanchez, N., Mehta, N., Robles, C., & Aycicegi, A. (2005). Lying in a first vs. a second language. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Society, May 26-29, Los Angeles, CA.

Harris, C.L. (2005). When is a first language more emotional? Presented at the Fifth International Symposium on Bilingualism, March 21-24, Barcelona, Spain.

Harris, C.L., Lung, W., Mehta, N., Poo, S., Robles, C., Swaminathan, N. (2005). When does a first language feel more emotional to bilingual speakers? Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, March 10-13, Boston, MA.

Harris, C.L. (2005). Religion, brain and mind: Individual and cultural variability. Symposium organized with presenters R. Abrahams, C. Robles, A. Wilson, and P. Cassel, for the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, March 10-13, Boston, MA.

Harris, C.L., & Feld, J. (2004). Language is Embodied, Emotional, and Contextualized: Evidence from Psychophysiological Studies of Bilingual Speakers. Presented at Language, Culture and Mind, University of Portsmouth. Portsmouth, U.K., July 17-20.

Harris, C.L., Bolton, R., Robles, C., & MacKay, D. (2004). Does emotion speed binding of word fragments into words? Presented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, Minneapolis, November 18-21.

Hannigan, S. L., & Harris, C.L. (2004). Illusions of inference: are people with schizotypal tendencies more vulnerable? Presented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, Minneapolis, November 18-21.

Morris, A., & Harris, C.L. (2004). Consequences of type activation without token individuation in repetition blindness. Presented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society, Minneapolis, November 18-21.

Harris, C.L. Jay, T., Pope, L. (2004). High arousal: Why are taboo words easy to recall without elaborative processing? Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Washington, D.C.

Aycicegi, A., & Harris, C.L. (2004). Deep and shallow processing of taboo and emotion words in a first and second language. Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Washington, D.C.

Ludowig, E., Niedeggen, M., Heil, M., Rolke, B., & Harris, C.L. (2003). Illusions electrified: ERP priming effects are induced by illusory words. Presented at the Annual Meetins of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, New York City.

Ludowig E., Niedeggen M., Heil M., Rolke B., Harris C.L. (2003). Meeting abstract: Journal of Psychophysiology, 17,165-165.

Morris, A.L., & Harris, C.L. (2003). Case-independent and case-specific repetition blindness in the cerebral hemispheres. Presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Vancouver.

Harris, C.L. (2003). Psychophysiological studies of emotional arousal to speakers' first and second languages. Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Ramsawh, H., & Harris, C.L. (2003). Women's Sexual Strategies: More Common (and Diverse) than We Think? Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Harris, C.L. (2003). First and second languages differ in emotional resonance. International Pragmatics Association Meeting, Toronto, Canada.

Harris, C.L., Aycicegi, A., & Dinn, W.M. (2003). Neuropsychological function in obsessive-compulsive disorder: Effects of comorbid conditions on task performance. Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Baltimore, MD.

Harris, C.L., & Dinn, W.M., & Aycicegi, A. (2003). Subtyping of OCD Patients Reveals Distinct Neurocognitive Profiles. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, New York, NY.

Pancharatnam, T., & Harris, C. (2003). Bilinguals' autonomic arousal to language mirrors their subjective emotional experience. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, New York, NY.

Harris, C.L., & Morris, A.L. (2003). Repetition-blinded words: transient, unconsciously activated. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston, MA.

Harris, C.L., & Morris, A.L. (2002). Explicit and implicit measures of repetition blindness. Presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Kansas City.

Morris, A.L., & Harris, C.L. (2002). Repetition blindness: Bug or feature? Presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Kansas City.

Holmes, S.H., Harris, C.L, & Dinn, W.D. (2002). Neuropsychological investigation into the validity of handwriting analysis. Paper presented to the American Association of Handwriting Analysts, July 10, 2002, Toronto, Ontario.

Harris, C.L., Aycicegi, A., & Berko Gleason, J. (2002). Taboo words and reprimands elicit greater autonomic reactivity in a first than in a second language. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Franciso, CA.

Harris, C.L., Aycicegi, A., & Morris, A.L. (2002). Words 'blinded' due to repeated letters show priming in word stem completion. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston, MA.

Harris, C.L., & Morris, A.L. (2001). The wordier the better: Strong repetition blindness occurs for nonwords. Presented at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Orlando, Florida.

Harris, C.L., Pardallis, V.A., & Frangou, T. (2001). Dominant grammatical cues (but not weak) survive cross-language interference in early second language acquisition. Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press. pdf

Perry, G.M.J., & Harris, C.L. (2001). Linguistically distinct sensitive periods for second language acquisition. Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Morris, A.L., & Harris,C.L. (2001). Repetition blindness: Out of sight or out of mind? Presented at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Orlando, Florida.

Dinn, W.M., Robbins, N.C., & Harris, C.L. (2000). Adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Neuropsychological correlates and clinical presentation. Presented at TENNET (Annual Conference on Theoretical and Experimental Neuropsychology), University of Quebec, Montreal.

Harris, C.L., & Aycicegi, A. (2000). How are diacritic letters represented? Evidence from Turkish repetition blindness. Presented at the 41st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society , New Orleans, LA. Abstract

Dinn, W.M., Marcinkiewicz, J.A., Harris, C.L., McGonigal, K.M., and Raynard, R.C. (1999). Complex Partial Seizures and Borderline Personality Disorder. Eastern Psychological Association , April 16-18, 1999, Providence, RI. Abstract

Dinn, W.M., & Harris, C.L. (1999). Orbitofrontal dysfunction: A neurobehavioral continuum. Presented at the APA 107th Annual Convention, August 20-24, Boston, MA. Abstract

Harris, C.L., & Dinn, W.M. (1999). Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Williams Syndrome: Disorders of frontal predominance. APA 107th Annual Convention, August 20-24, Boston, MA. Summary

Harris, C.L., Morris, A.L, & Ducumbs, S. (1999). Repetition Blindness in the cerebral hemispheres. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Franciso, CA.

Harris, C.L. (1999). Orthographic repetition blindness: a general-purpose tool for cognitive psychologists. Invited paper, Eastern Psychological Association, April 16-18, 1999, Providence, RI. Abstract

Harris, C.L.,& Morris A.L. (1998). Misperceptions of temporal order. Presented at the 69th AnnualMeeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston, MA. Summary

Harris, C.L., & Morris A.L. (1998). Orthographic repetition blindness is not word-to-word similarity inhibition. Presented at the 39th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Dallas, Texas. Abstract

Morris, A.L. & Harris, C.L. (1998). Repetition blindness: Levels of processing revisited. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Madison, Wisconsin. Abstract

Subiaul, F., Harris, C.L., & Deacon, T.W. (1998). The cerebellum and the automatization of language. Presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Forum, Boston MA, Oct 21. Abstract

Dorffner, G., & Harris, C.L. (1997). When pseudowords become words: Effects of learning on orthographic similarity priming. Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Stanford, California.

Harris, C.L., & Shirai, Y. (1997). Selecting past-tense forms for new words: Whatís meaning got to do with it? Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Stanford, California.

Harris, C.L., & Morris A.L. (1997). The letter clusters theory of repetition blindness . Presented at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Philadelphia, PA. Abstract

Morris, A.L., & Harris, C.L. (1997). All those chocolate dandy bars can make you fat: Evidence from repetition blindness for top-down effects on lexical access. Human Sentence Processing Conference, Stanford, California. Abstract

Harris, C.L. (1997). Distributed representations and mixed schemas. Presented at NIPS Workshop 'Neural models of Concept Learning', Dec. 6, Breckenridge, CO. LongAbstract.

Harris, C.L. (1996). Exploring the continuum of unit size in word identification. Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society , University of Pittsburgh, PA.

Harris, C.L., & Morris, A.L. (1996). Letter clusters unite: Illusory words in repetition blindness. Presented to the 37th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Nov 3-6, Chicago.

Harris, C. L. (1995). A corpus-based approach to sense selection and contextual integration. Presented at the Eighth Annual CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing, March 17, 1995.

Beusmans, B., Aginsky, V., Harris, C.L., & Rensink, R. (1995). Analyzing situation awareness during wayfinding in a driving simulator. Proceedings of the Experimental Analysis of Measurement Conference.

Harris, C.L., & Beeman, R. (1995). Multi-sense priming of homograph targets in the left and right visual fields. Poster presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting , March 26, 1995, San Francisco.

Harris, C.L., & Shirai, Y. (1995). Schema consistency in L2 acquisition of the English past tense. Second Language Research Forum , Ithica, New York.

Harris, C.L. (1995). Incongruous extra-word context impairs letter detection. 36th Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Los Angeles, CA.

Harris, C.L. (1993). Using old words in news ways: The effect of argument structure, form class and affixation. Proceedings of the 1993 Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society.   (Discusses the English past-tense debate). Full text pdf.

Harris, C.L. (1992). Understanding English past-tense formation: The shared meaning hypothesis. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society . Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Harris, C.L., & Touretzky, D.S. (1991). Verbal polysemy as a knowledge representation problem. Proceedings of the Second International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Santa Cruz, CA.

Harris, C.L. (1991). Can connectionism advance linguistic theory? Three areas where the answers are yes, no and maybe. Working Notes, AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) Spring Symposium on Connectionist Natural Language Processing. Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.

Harris, C.L., & Bates, E.A. (1990). Functional constraints on backwards pronominal reference. Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society , 635-642. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Harris, C.L., & Elman, J.L. (1989). Representing variable information with simple recurrent networks. Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society . Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Harris, C.L. (1989). A connectionist approach to the story of `over.' Berkeley Linguistics Society, 15, 126-138.

Colloquia and Invited Presentations

March 5, 2008. The difficulty of acquiring a second language in adulthood: Is emotionally-mediated learning the missing ingredient? Colloquium presented to National Taiwanese University.

May 27, 2007. How are recent findings about emotions and multilingualism relevant to psychological and linguistic theories? Workshop on Bilingualism and Emotion, University of Kent.

February 2006. Emotion: The always neglected, all-essential ingredient for language acquisition and processing. Colloquium presented to the Psychology Department, Cornell University.

October 2005: Emotion: Neglected by theorists, essential for learning. Colloquium presented to the Psychology Depatment, SUNY Albany. (Invited by: Jeanette Altarriba).

March 2005: Leaping to conclusions: Errors of inference made by individuals with schizotypal personality traits. Colloquium presented to Brigham Behavioral Neuroscience colloquium.

April, 2003: Emotions, the Brain, & Bilingualism: Is the First Language the Language of Greater Emotional Expressiveness? Presented to Learning and the Brain Conference, Hyatt Regency, Cambridge, Mass. See: http://www.edupr.com/Brain8.htm

March, 2002: Neuropsychological tasks which tap individual variation in sensitivity to dynamically changing reinforcement contingencies. Presented to Massachusetts Mental Health.

March 2001: Orbitofrontal dysfunction in psychopathy and obsessive-compulsive disorder: a neurobiological continuum? Behavioral Neuroscience Seminar Series, 3/8/01, Brigham and Women's Hospital.

May 8, 2001: Repetition blindness: A tool for investigating word recognition. Presented at the University of Hull, U.K.

January 2001: When hunches mislead: Problem-solving deficits in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Presented at: Neuroscience of Emotion and Consciousness II, January 13, 2001.

Feb 9, 1999: Letter clusters unite: Illusory words produced by repetition blindness. Presented to the Harvard Vision Lab, Psychology Department, Harvard University.

July 21, 1999: Orbitofrontal Dysfunction: A Neurobehavioral Continuum. Presented to Massachusetts Mental Health.

April 16, 1999: Orthographic repetition blindness: A technique for probing sublexical representations. Invited paper, Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association.

June 8, 1996: Towards a lexicon of variable-sized units: Data from letter detection, visual search and repetition blindness. Presented to the McDonnel-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience Annual Meeting, Babson College, MA.

March, 1995: The psycholinguistics of multi-word units. Colloquium presented to the Department of Psychology, Indiana University.

May 11, 1995: Hal's semantics: Lost in vector space? Invited presentation to TENNET (Annual Conference on Theoretical and Experimental Neuropsychology), May 10-12, University of Quebec, Montreal.

Feb 27, 1995: Units larger than words. Colloquium presented at UC Riverside.

June, 1993: Invited Faculty for the 1993 Connectionist Models Summer School (June 21- July 2, University of Colorado, Boulder).

June, 1992: Coarse coding and the lexicon. Invited presentation to "Le continu en semantique linguistique: Table-Ronde", 22-24 June 1992, Universite de Caen, France.

Ad-hoc Reviewing: Research articles, Conferences and Funding Agencies

National Science Foundation (2004-2007)

Personality and Individual Differences (2007)

Journal of Pragmatics (2007-2008)

World Cultural Psychiatry Research Review (2007)

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (2006)

Applied Cognitive Psychology (2005-2006)

Archives of General Psychiatry (2003-2004)

Memory and Cognition (2003-2005; 2007-2008)

Journal of Memory and Language (1998-2006)

Psychonomic Bulletin and Review (2002-2005)

Issues in Applied Linguistics (2001-2002)

Behavior and Brain Sciences (2000)

Human Nature (2000)

American Anthropologist (2000)

International Journal of Bilingualism (2005)

International Journal of Psychology (2004)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition (2002-2005)

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (1999-2005)

Psychological Science (1998-2005)

Psychological Review (1994-1995)

Boston University Child Language Development Conference (1995-present)

Cognitive Science (1995-1997)

Connection Science (1995, 2000)

Neural Information Processing Society (NIPS 1994, 1995)

Teaching Interests

Graduate and undergraduate courses in cross-cultural psychology, cognitive science, psycholinguistics, cognitive development, developmental psychology, first and second language acquisition.

Ph.D. Advisors: Professors Elizabeth Bates and Jeffrey Elman.

Supervision of Ph.D. Students: Alison Morris, M.A. (Ph.D. 2000). Supervision of Post-Doctoral Fellow: Dr. Ayse Aycicegi, Istanbul University (February 1999 - November 2001). Current doctoral advisees: Paul Cassel (Philosophy; jointly supervised with Wesley Wilman in Philsophy); Kristina Dahlen (Applied Linguistics); Hui-wen Cheng (Applied Linguistics); Veronica Gross (Program in Neuroscience), Jimmy Tong (Psychology), Henry Bley-Vronman (Psychology).

Other doctoral or masters students who were co-authors on publications or conference proceedings: Wayne Dinn, Norma Sanchez, T. Pancharatnam, Rendi Bolton, Sarah Holmes, Sherry Ducumbs, Victoria Pardallis, Paul Greene, Sharon Hannigan, Holly Ramsawh, Angela Wilson, Nadya Vasilveya (Northeastern University).

Undergraduate collaborators on papers or conference proceedings: Marianna Staroselsky, Vicky Rukovets, Brenda Ventura, Colpan Angun, Inna Ryvkin, Nisha Mehta, Christopher Robles, Sinlan Poo, Neela Swaminathan, Juli Feld, Leah Pope, Theresa Frangou, George Perry, Nicole Robbins, Kelly McGonigal, Francis Subiaul, Vlada Aginsky

Professional Associations

Member, The Psychonomic Society , 1995 - present

Associate, Behavioral and Brain Sciences , 1991 - present

Member, Cognitive Science Society , 1992 - 2004

Member, Society for Cognitive Neuroscience , 1994 - 2006

Member, American Psychological Association, 1997-present

Member, American Psychological Society, 1997-present

Member, Eastern Psychological Association, 1997-2005

Member, Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation, 1999-2002