Nazbanou Nozari, Ph.D. - US grants

In everyday language use, speakers are able to produce sentences effortlessly, weaving together multiple words while following complex grammatical rules. The ease with which sentences are produced has led to speculations that sentence production may not rely on executive functions such as inhibitory control. This project aims to test whether inhibitory control plays a role in grammatical production by focusing on subject-verb agreement 'attraction' errors. In English, the subject of the sentence agrees with the verb in number (e.g., "The lion is red," "The lions are red"). Attraction errors arise when the sentence contains a second noun with a different grammatical number than the subject noun, as in "The lion next to the birds ARE red." Understanding the role of inhibitory control in sentence production could provide key insights on how to evaluate and treat language impairments, as well as how to develop more effective pedagogical methods for children who produce non-adult-like syntactic structures. The proposed research provides opportunities to bring together undergraduate and graduate students in medical and cognitive science research, and the outcome of this research will be disseminated to the broader public through community outreach programs and aphasia rehabilitation projects.

This project uses two approaches to investigate whether subject-verb agreement errors are independent of executive (inhibitory) control. The first approach uses a combination of experimental techniques that manipulate inhibitory demand with advanced statistical modeling to test the contribution of different types of inhibitory control to the prevention of attraction errors. Second, the experiments are extended to 6- to 8-year-old children to investigate how the development of executive control abilities aligns with the developmental trajectory of agreement production abilities.

The goal of Women in Cognitive Science is to improve the visibility of women in the field and to create an environment that invites discussion of the issues that all scientists, but women in particular, may be required to negotiate in the trajectory of creating and sustaining a successful career. A combination of online events, networking opportunities, and virtual or in-person workshops are designed for women in cognitive science, especially women in the early stages of their academic career. The workshops focus on building networks for success, promoting visibility of women scientists and their stories, and exploring pathways to academic and non-academic careers in cognitive science. A robust suite of online events will take place throughout the year and provide ongoing opportunities for women in cognitive science to build opportunities for research collaboration, seek mentoring across career stages, and engage in discussion of strategies for improving visibility and career advancement.

Virtual and in-person workshops will take place at meetings of the Psychonomic Society, the Cognitive Science Society, the Association for Psychological Sciences, and the American Psychological Association. The workshops will take the form of public forums with invited speaker-panelists to initiate discussion about best practices for the professional advancement of women in cognitive science at the individual and institutional level. These workshops will include online engagement to increase exposure, and will also feature "speed-mentoring" for personalized assistance to early career researchers. By partnering with established societies, the WiCS group will maximize the opportunity for systemic change that addresses the career challenges of a group that continues to be underrepresented in senior academic and industry positions in the cognitive sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Whether chatting with a friend at a café, discussing a topic in a classroom, or debating politics with a relative, we depend on our ability to communicate with many different people. Only 5 percent of the 7.5 billion English speakers are native talkers and there are also tremendous dialect differences in regional English. Thus, we quite often encounter a speaker whose speech differs from our own. Prior research demonstrates that links in how the brain coordinates listening and speaking can lead conversation partners to sound more like one another. The influence of what one hears on how one talks is often referred to as “transfer.” Transfer provides a window through which to better understand the mechanistic links between speech perception and speech production. This is important because it provides a foundation for broader impacts across a variety of domains, such as: 1) developing new technologies for effective education approaches in classrooms with language diversity; 2) assisting individuals with communication challenges like stuttering; 3) providing constraints to refine artificial intelligence and machine speech recognition systems; and 4) engineering brain prostheses that can restore speech lost to stroke.<br/><br/>The current project focuses on understanding how the brain links what we hear with how we speak, even when changes are subtle and not consciously identifiable. The investigators take a novel approach to the study of transfer by manipulating the make-up of the speech stream in subtle but systematic ways. This method allows clear predictions about the expected changes to production if it is implicitly influenced by perception. Preliminary data suggest this is the case: creating a subtle accent by manipulating the pitch of a voice induces robust changes in how speakers produce the very same dimension. This influence goes beyond immediate imitation of heard speech (for example, repeating a just-heard word). Rather, it implies a more fundamental change to the speaker’s production system that likely involves a form of incremental learning through small, but persistent, neuroplastic changes to the brain. The current project will systematically investigate when and how transfer occurs in order to reveal the responsible mechanisms.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.