Graduate student Qi Cheng, a Ph.D candidate in our department and a member of Rachel Mayberry Lab for Multimodal Language Development, was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Linguistics Program – Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (#1917922) for her dissertation work. Her research examines the biological foundations of human language with a focus on early language experience, linking observations from language learning, processing, and the brain network. Supported by the grant, she is currently conducting two psycholinguistic experiments to explore sentence processing strategies used by deaf late signers who suffered from early language deprivation. She presented the preliminary findings at CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing and Theoretical Issues in Signed Language Research (TISLR). She recently published a paper on the neural language pathways of deaf signers with and without early language on Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Cheng, Q., & Mayberry, R. ‘Word order or world knowledge? Effects of early language deprivation on simple sentence comprehension.’ Oral presentation at the 13th conference of Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research, Hamburg, Germany, September 2019.

Cheng, Q., Roth, A., Halgren, E., & Mayberry, R. I. ‘Effects of early language deprivation on brain connectivity: Language pathways in deaf native and late first-language learners of American Sign Language.’ Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13, 320. 2019