Vicky Tzuyin Lai
University of Arizona, Psychology, Faculty Member
- University of South Carolina, Psychology, Post-Docadd
- Please see https://sites.google.com/site/tzuyinlai/ for more about me and the latest publications. Thank you.edit
Research Interests:
This study investigated the brain regions for the comprehension of implied emotion in sentences. Participants read negative sentences without negative words, for example, “The boy fell asleep and never woke up again,” and their neutral... more
This study investigated the brain regions for the comprehension of implied emotion in sentences. Participants read negative sentences without negative words, for example, “The boy fell asleep and never woke up again,” and their neutral counterparts “The boy stood up and grabbed his bag.” This kind of negative sentence allows us to examine implied emotion derived at the sentence level, without associative emotion coming from word retrieval. We found that implied emotion in sentences, relative to neutral sentences, led to activation in some emotion-related areas, including the medial prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the insula, as well as certain language-related areas, including the inferior frontal gyrus, which has been implicated in combinatorial processing. These results suggest that the emotional network involved in implied emotion is intricately related to the network for combinatorial processing in language, supporting the view that sentence meaning is more than simply concatenating the meanings of its lexical building blocks.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Semantics, Vocabulary, Electroencephalography, and 18 moreLexical Semantics, Face recognition (Psychology), Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain Mapping, Brain, Humans, Word Recognition, Female, Male, Reaction Time, Young Adult, Lexical access, Time Factors, Visual Word Recognition, Top Down, Visual Evoked Potentials, Neurosciences, and Time Course
Cognitive linguists suggest that understanding metaphors requires activation of conceptual mappings between the involved concepts. We tested whether mappings are indeed in use during metaphor comprehension, and what mapping means as a... more
Cognitive linguists suggest that understanding metaphors requires activation of conceptual mappings between the involved concepts. We tested whether mappings are indeed in use during metaphor comprehension, and what mapping means as a cognitive process with Event-Related Potentials. Participants read literal, conventional metaphorical, novel metaphorical, and anomalous target sentences preceded by primes with related or unrelated mappings. Experiment 1 used sentence-primes to activate related mappings, and Experiment 2 used simile-primes to induce comparison thinking. In the unprimed conditions of both experiments, metaphors elicited N400s more negative than the literals. In Experiment 1, related sentence-primes reduced the metaphor-literal N400 difference in conventional, but not in novel metaphors. In Experiment 2, related simile-primes reduced the metaphor-literal N400 difference in novel, but not clearly in conventional metaphors. We suggest that mapping as a process occurs in metaphors, and the ways in which it can be facilitated by comparison differ between conventional and novel metaphors.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have problems understanding emotion in social context. However, little is known about whether persons with ASD have problems in processing emotion encoded in language. One recent ERP study... more
Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have problems understanding emotion in social context. However, little is known about whether persons with ASD have problems in processing emotion encoded in language. One recent ERP study showed that, while emotional words elicited an enhanced late positivity component (LPC) relative to neutral words in controls, this LPC-effect was absent in ASD [1]. This suggests that ASD individuals might not have recognized emotion in language, at least not in single words, assuming the LPC reflects allocation of attentional resources [2]. We investigated the processing of emotional sentences in high-functioning ASD individuals and matched controls. Words in sentential context may be more situationally grounded than words in isolation, which may aid emotion processing in ASD. Affectively pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant words were embedded in 120 non-constraining sentential contexts (John gave his wife a kiss/bag/slap). Word valence was assessed...
When people see a snake, they are likely to activate both affective information (e.g., dangerous) and non-affective information about its ontological category (e.g., animal). According to the Affective Primacy Hypothesis, the affective... more
When people see a snake, they are likely to activate both affective information (e.g., dangerous) and non-affective information about its ontological category (e.g., animal). According to the Affective Primacy Hypothesis, the affective information has priority, and its activation can precede identification of the ontological category of a stimulus. Alternatively, according to the Cognitive Primacy Hypothesis, perceivers must know what they are looking at before they can make an affective judgment about it. We propose that neither hypothesis holds at all times. Here we show that the relative speed with which affective and non-affective information gets activated by pictures and words depends upon the contexts in which stimuli are processed. Results illustrate that the question of whether affective information has processing priority over ontological information (or vice versa) is ill-posed. Rather than seeking to resolve the debate over Cognitive vs. Affective Primacy in favor of one...
Research Interests: Psychology and Emotion
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
We present a compendium of recent and current projects that utilize crowdsourcing technologies for language studies, finding that the quality is comparable to controlled laboratory experiments, and in some cases superior. While... more
We present a compendium of recent and current projects that utilize crowdsourcing technologies for language studies, finding that the quality is comparable to controlled laboratory experiments, and in some cases superior. While crowdsourcing has primarily been used for annotation in recent language studies, the results here demonstrate that far richer data may be generated in a range of linguistic disciplines from semantics to psycholinguistics. For these, we report a number of successful methods for evaluating ...