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Vicky Tzuyin Lai, PhD, MA, BA

Interim Director, Cognitive Science
Associate Professor, Psychology
Associate Professor, Cognitive Science
Associate Professor, Cognitive Science - GIDP
Associate Professor, Second Language Acquisition / Teaching
Associate Professor, BIO5 Institute

PO Box 210068
Building: Psychology (#68)
Room #: 509

(520) 621-7447
tzuyinlai@arizona.edu

Selected Publications

Van Dam, W. O., Speed, L. J., Lai, V. T., Vigliocco, G., & Desai, R. H. (2017). Effects of Motion Speed in Action Representations. Brain and Language, 168, 47–56.
 
Lai, V. T. & Huettig, F. (2016). When Prediction is Fulfilled: Insight from Emotion Processing. Neuropsychologia, 85,110-117
 
Desai, R. H. Choi, W. Lai, V. T., & Henderson, J. M. (2016). Towards Semantics in the
Wild: Activation to Manipulable Nouns in Naturalistic Reading. Journal of Neuroscience, 36(14): 4050-4055.
 
Lai, V. T. & Desai, R. H. (2016). The Grounding of Temporal Metaphors. Cortex, 76, 43-45.
 
Coulson, S., & Lai, V. T. (2016). Editorial: The Metaphorical Brain. Frontiers in HumanNeuroscience, 9, 699.
 
Samur, D., Lai, V. T., Hagoort, P., & Willems, R. (2015). Emotional Context Modulates Embodied Metaphor Comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 78 (2015), 108-114.
 
Lai, V. T., Willems, R. M., & Hagoort, P. (2015). Feel Between The Lines: Implied Emotion In Sentence Comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 27(8), 1528–1541.
 
Lai, V. T., Conant, L., Binder, J., & Desai, R. (2015). Effects of Processing Difficulty on Metaphor Laterality. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 44.
 

Sponsored Research Through MSRP

Viet Huynh, (MSRP 2002): "Up-regulation of Renal Calcium Channels by Thiazide"; (MSRP 2003): "Effects of Cyclosporine A on Renal Calcium Transporters"
 

NIH Undergraduate Diversity Program

Tachelle Morez, 2017; "Language, Emotion, and the Brain (EEG)"

Degrees

  • National Taiwan University, 1996-1999 (B.A., Languages and Literatures; Minor: German)
  • National Taiwan University Thesis: Psycholinguistic Processing of Temporal Perspectives in Mandarin, 1999-2002 (M.A., Linguistics)
  • Advisor: Kathleen Ahrens; Committee: I-wen Su, Chu-Ren Huang
  • University of Colorado Boulder, 2004-2009 Dec (Ph.D., Cognitive Science and Linguistics)
  • Dissertation: Understanding Metaphorical Expressions: Conventionality, Mappings, and Comparison Processes; Advisors: Tim Curran, Bhuvana Narasimhan; Committee: Albert Kim, Martha Palmer, Laura Michaelis-Cummings

Awards

  • Best Paper Award, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado 2009
  • Fu Ssu-Nien Highest Academic Achievement Award for Master Students, Taiwan 2002

Research Interests

Cognitive science
Cognitive neuroscience
Psycholinguistics
Language
Semantics
Metaphor
Language and emotion, Language and thought
ERP/EEG, functional MRI, computational corpus linguistics