Vicky Tzuyin Lai

The University of Arizona | UA · Department of Psychology

When reading, comprehenders construct a message-level representation and integrate new information as it becomes available. Such compositional processing may differ for idioms, where the meanings of the individual words do not always relate to the figurative meaning. Here, we examined how predictability and idiom decomposability contribute to compo...

Experimental evidence suggests that modality-specific concept features such as action, motion, and sound partially rely on corresponding action/perception neural networks in the human brain. Little is known, however, about time-related features of concepts. We examined whether temporal features of concepts recruit networks that subserve time percep...

Introduction Mood is a constant in our daily life and can permeate all levels of cognition. We examined whether and how mood influences the processing of discourse content that is relatively neutral and not loaded with emotion. During discourse processing, readers have to constantly strike a balance between what they know in long term memory and wh...

Languages differ in the way motion events are encoded. In satellite-framed languages, motion verbs typically encode manner, while in verb-framed languages, path. We investigated the ways in which satellite-framed Dutch and verb-framed Turkish co-determine one’s attention to motion events in early bilinguals. In an EEG oddball paradigm, Turkish–Dutc...

Older adults often show a positivity bias effect during picture processing, focusing more on positive than negative information. It is unclear whether this positivity bias effect generalizes to language and whether arousal matters. The present study investigated how age affects emotional word comprehension with varied valence (positive, negative) a...

Expressives (damn) convey speaker attitude and when used in context (Tom lost the damn dog) can be flexibly applied locally to the noun (dog) or globally to the whole sentence (the situation). We used ERPs to explore brain responses to expressives in sentences. Participants read expressive, descriptive, and pseudoword adjectives followed by nouns i...

This study examined whether the context of acquisition of a word influences its visual recognition and subsequent processing. We utilized taboo words, whose meanings are typically acquired socially, to ensure that differences in processing were based on learned social taboo, rather than proficiency. American English-speaking participants made word/...

Facial emojis can express a variety of positive and negative emotions, and are commonly used in digital, written communication. However, little is known about how emojis impact text processing and how different emoji-text combinations give rise to a sender's mental state. In this study, we investigated how facial emojis with positive valence (= hap...

Verbal irony is when words intend the opposite of their literal meaning. We investigated the emotional function of irony by asking whether irony intensifies or mitigates negative feelings. Experiment 1 used ratings to assess the mental state of a speaker using irony or literal language following a negative event in either a high- or a low-emotional...

Phishing emails constitute a major problem, linked to fraud and exploitation as well as subsequent negative health outcomes including depression and suicide. Because of their sheer volume, and because phishing emails are designed to deceive, purely technological solutions can only go so far, leaving human judgment as the last line of defense. Howev...

Despite increased focus on emotional language, research lacks for the most emotional language: Swearing. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether swear words have content distinct from function words, and if so, whether this content is emotional or social in nature. Stimuli included swear (e.g. shit, damn), negative but non-sw...

Recent research has investigated how personality trait differences influence the processing of emotion conveyed by pictures, but limited research has examined the emotion conveyed by words. The present study investigated whether extraversion (extroverts vs. introverts) and neuroticism (high neurotics vs. low neurotics) influence the processing of p...

Phishing emails constitute a major public health problem, linked to negative health outcomes due to fraud and exploitation. Because of their sheer volume and because phishing emails are designed to deceive, purely technological solutions such as filters only go so far, leaving human judgment as the last line of defense against phishing. However, in...

The timing of sensory-motor activation during the comprehension of action verbs used in a metaphorical sense is not well understood. In the present Event Related Potential (ERP) study, participants read verbs in metaphoric (The church bent the rules), literal-concrete (The bodyguard bent the rod), and literal-abstract (The church altered the rules)...

Grounded cognition accounts of semantic representation posit that brain regions traditionally linked to perception and action play a role in grounding the semantic content of words and sentences. Sensory-motor systems are thought to support partially abstract simulations through which conceptual content is grounded. However, which details of sensor...

Unlabelled: The neural basis of language processing, in the context of naturalistic reading of connected text, is a crucial but largely unexplored area. Here we combined functional MRI and eye tracking to examine the reading of text presented as whole paragraphs in two experiments with human subjects. We registered high-temporal resolution eye-tra...

Speakers of English habitually encode motion events using manner–of–motion verbs (e.g., spin, roll, slide) whereas Spanish speakers rely on path–of–motion verbs (e.g., enter, exit, approach). Here, we ask whether the language–specific verb representations used in encoding motion events induce different modes of “thinking–for–speaking” in Spanish–En...

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 e...

The role of the two hemispheres in processing metaphoric language is controversial. While some studies have reported a special role of the right hemisphere (RH) in processing metaphors, others indicate no difference in laterality relative to literal language. Some studies have found a role of the RH for novel/unfamiliar metaphors, but not conventio...

When speakers describe motion events using different languages, they subsequently classify those events in language-specific ways (Gennari, Sloman, Malt & Fitch, 2002). Here we ask if bilingual speakers flexibly shift their event classification preferences based on the language in which they verbally encode those events. English–Spanish bilinguals...

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 word...

In this paper we examine whether experience with spatial metaphors for time has an influence on people's representation of time. In particular we ask whether spatio-temporal metaphors can have both chronic and immediate effects on temporal thinking. In Study 1, we examine the prevalence of ego-moving representations for time in Mandarin speakers, E...

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....

We used ERPs to investigate the time course of interactions between lexical semantic and sublexical visual word form processing during word recognition. Participants read sentence-embedded pseudowords that orthographically resembled a contextually supported real word (e.g., "She measured the flour so she could bake a ceke…") or did not (e.g., "She...

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 ric...

The neural mechanisms underlying the processing of conventional and novel conceptual metaphorical sentences were examined with event-related potentials (ERPs). Conventional metaphors were created based on the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor and were operationally defined as familiar and readily interpretable. Novel metaphors were unfamiliar and har...

Psycholinguistic studies of metaphor process- ing must control their stimuli not just for word frequency but also for the frequency with which a term is used metaphorically. Thus, we consider the task of metaphor fre- quency estimation, which predicts how often target words will be used metaphorically. We develop metaphor classifiers which represen...

In Classical Chinese, there were four first person pronouns: wu2, wo3, yu2, yu3, and a zero-pronoun 1 with the following functions: wu2 was the default marking the speaker; wo3 coded contrast between the speaker and others; yu3 was used when talking about the speaker in connection with heaven, kings, or death; yu2 was used exclusively by kings and...

In this study, we explored methods for linking Chinese and English sense invento-ries using two opposing approaches: creat-ing links (1) bottom-up: by starting at the finer-grained sense level then proceeding to the verb subcategorization frames and (2) top-down: by starting directly with the more coarse-grained frame levels. The sense inventories...

This paper investigates what words map from the source domain of PLANT in Mandarin Chinese. In particular, we examine how different aspects of the source domain of PLANT are mapped onto the different target domains of LOVE, MARRIAGE, HAPPINESS, and BELIEFS. We found that mapping principles can account for the different mappings (Ahrens 2000).

When people see a snake, they are likely to activate both affective information (e.g., dangerous) and non-affective information (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 th...