Research and Background
I was trained at UC San Diego, 1985-1991, where I studied under the guidance of Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey 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 language (see powerpoint
presentation for overview of this research and 2009 journal article 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 (see paper).
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.
Courses
Spring 2016 Supervising student research Fall 2016 CAS PS545 A1, Language Development MWF 2-3 Fall 2016 CAS PS560 A1, Cross-Cultural Psychology M 11-2 Spring 2017 CAS PS560 A1, Cross-Cultural Psychology M 3-6 Spring 2017 KHC PS101 Revolutions in Conceptualizing the Mind:
1950s to the Present TBA