Research. Cognition and action "in the wild" occur in rich contexts. Our research explores how information from multiple sources is integrated in naturalistic tasks, using a combination of behavioral and neural methods and computational modeling. Our research interests include: neurobiology of language; speech perception; spoken word recognition; sentence processing; reading; language development; developmental and acquired disorders of language; computational models as theory-building tools; developing comprehensive understanding of language plasticity over the lifespan from cognitive, neural and genetic perspectives through interdisciplinary collaborations. For more details, see our
publications. Here is a representative subset of
current projects:
- Developing a unified phonological and semantic computational model of spoken word recognition from a network science framework (with PhD student Rachael Steiner)
- Neural and behavioral bases of prosody processing in Specific Language Impairment (with PhD students Liz Simmons and Monica Li)
- Time course of phonological competition in spoken word recognition from toddlers to adults (with PhD student Liz Simmons)
- Predicting individual differences in reading ability from the time course of spoken word recognition (with PhD student Monica Li)
Opportunities. The lab admits new PhD students most years (applications due December 1). We are a core lab with the NSF-funded IGERT training program, Language Plasticity: Gene, Brain, Cognition, Computation (Jim Magnuson, PI). We almost always have room for undergraduate students who want to be involved in research. We occasionally have openings for postdocs or technicians. Prospective students, postdocs, or lab techs should feel free to send inquiries to Jim Magnuson.