Master’s Thesis Defense
Congratulations to Cristal Giorio for successfully defending and passing her Master’s thesis!
Her thesis is titled Impact of Accent Variants on Intelligibility and Real-Time Processing of Native-Accented Speech.
Welcome Ingrid Chuang to the BiLD Lab!
Welcome our newest graduate student, Ingrid Chuang!
Ingrid is a first year graduate student in the BiLD Lab.
She is from Taiwan and is studying Cognitive Psychology. She received her BA and MA from National Taiwan University. Her research interests include bilingualism, language processing, and ERP methodologies.
Welcome Zachary Maher to the BiLD Lab!
Congratulations to Zachary Maher who received an NSF SMA Postdoctoral Fellowship! The title of his two-year postdoctoral project is Neurolinguistic mechanisms of grammatical processing across different dialects. Zach will join us our lab in September 2023.
College of the Liberal Arts News Feature
Check out a news feature that reflects on Dr. Van Hell’s distinguished professor title, research, and the BiLD lab!
Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts News: click here!
Dr. Van Hell – Distinguished Professor Recognition
Congratulations to Dr. Janet van Hell for being named Distinguished Professor by Penn State!
Penn State’s announcement:
“The distinguished professor title recognizes outstanding academic contribution to the University. This special academic title is bestowed upon a limited number of professors who are leaders in their fields of research or creative activity and who have demonstrated significant leadership with respect to teaching, research or creative activity, and service.
Van Hell studies the neural and cognitive processes underlying language learning, in particular second language learning and bi/multilingualism. She is a prominent scholar in the field — van Hell has received more than 30 grants during her time at Penn State and most of her work is collaborative and multidisciplinary. She also is known as a dedicated mentor and teacher”.
NSF DDRI Award
Congrats to Holly Zaharchuk on receiving an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRI)! A federal grant to fund dissertation research.
Conference Paper Presentation
Eric Pelzl will be presenting his paper at Psychonomics 2022 titled High Variability Orthographic Training: Learning Words in a Morphosyllabic Script Through Training with Multiple Fonts.
SNL 2022 Conference
October 2022
Adriana Miller and Cristal Giorio presented posters at this year’s Society of Neurobiology of Language (SNL) located in Philadelphia, PA.
Adriana’s poster is titled Novel Metaphor Processing in a Second Language.
Cristal’s poster is titled Your accent is my accent? How accent variants impact listener’s accented speech processing.
NSF Research Traineeship – LinDiv
Fall 2022
Congrats to Cristal Giorio for being accepted to the NSF Research Traineeship program “Linguistic diversity across the lifespan: Transforming training to advance human-technology interaction” (LinDiv). This two-year certificate program comes with one year of funding.
For more about the NRT LinDiv program check out this website.