Research Assistants Rachael McCollum and Therese O’Neill Awarded PCLB Psychological Sciences Undergraduate Research Grant

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Two of the Language Creation Lab’s undergraduate research assistants, Rachael McCollum and Therese O’Neill, have been awarded the PCLB Psychological Sciences Undergraduate Research Grant. Rachael’s project is titled “The impact of language experience on the development of the number representations in deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing children”, and Therese’s project is titled “Investigating social perspective-taking in effective communication and language regularization.” Both projects will be advised by Dr. Marie Coppola. The grant will provide funding for Rachael and Therese to complete their projects in the upcoming year.

Congratulations Rachael and Therese!

Congratulations to Graduate Student Jessica Contreras for Earning her Master of Science in Experimental Psychology at RIT!

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Jessica Contreras, a Developmental Psychology PhD student and member of the Language Creation Lab, recently completed her Master of Science degree in Experimental Psychology from Rochester Institute of Technology. Her thesis investigated the relationship between language and cognition for Deaf individuals with cochlear implants, focusing on factors such as executive function, proficiency in English, proficiency in ASL, age of cochlear implant, age of exposure to ASL, and socioeconomic status. Congratulations Jessica!

Russell Richie, Matt Hall, Sarah Lodge, Megan Brown, and Dr. Marie Coppola Named Runners-Up for Best Poster at EvoLang 2016

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Congratulations to Russell Richie, Matt Hall, Sarah Lodge, Megan Brown, and Dr. Marie Coppola, whose research was named as one of two runners-up for best poster at the 2016 EvoLang conference! Entitled, “The impact of communicative network structure on the conventionalization of referring expressions in gesture,” this project asks how people come to agree on what to call things. Their behavioral experiment demonstrated that groups of people reach agreement faster when all possible pairs communicate compared to when all communication is channeled through one central hub. The work was funded by an IGERT Innovation award to Russell Richie. You can read their paper here!
EvoLang2016