Vicky Tzuyin Lai, PhD, MA, BA

Assistant Professor, Psychology
Assistant Professor, Cognitive Science
Assistant Professor, Cognitive Science - GIDP
Assistant Professor, Second Language Acquisition / Teaching - GIDP
 
Education: 
  • 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
 
Honors and Awards: 
  • Best Paper Award, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado 2009
  • Fu Ssu-Nien Highest Academic Achievement Award for Master Students, Taiwan 2002
Major Areas of Research Interest: 
Topics:
  • Cognitive science
  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Language
  • Semantics
  • Metaphor
  • Language and emotion, Language and thought.
Techniques:
  • ERP/EEG, functional MRI, computational corpus linguistics.
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)"
 
Tuesday, March 6, 2018