Hi, I’m Bethany (she/her)! I am a first-year doctoral student at NYU Steinhardt in the Communicative Sciences and Disorders program. I work with Si On Yoon in the CoMM Lab, studying the intersection between language and memory.

Research Interests

My current research interests include language neuroscience, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and cognitive science.

During the early stages of my PhD, I hope to work with healthy younger and older adults to clarify the neurocognitive mechanisms behind predictive preactivation and language processing. Mixed findings regarding language prediction ability across the lifespan likely stem from the regular use of unnatural stimulus-response lab tasks. To prioritize ecological validity, my work will initially be conducted in an eye-tracking paradigm which simulates everyday conversation.

In subsequent studies, this paradigm will be extended into EEG/ERP. I also intend to expand this language prediction research into populations with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease and/or Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) in the future. The ultimate goal of my doctoral research program will be to contribute to ecologically-valid models of cognition and language use across the lifespan (see: cognitive aging). Furthermore, I would like to incorporate neural, cognitive, and behavioral measures into a computational framework to model prediction across the lifespan– looking into how predictive mechanisms change with age.

Background

I received a B.S. in Psychological and Brain Sciences and B.A.s in English and Linguistics (Speech-Language Sciences and Disorders) from UC Santa Barbara in 2024. While there, I worked with Laurel Brehm’s PRPL Lab in the UCSB Linguistics department to complete my undergraduate thesis. This piece observed prosody-mediated language processing via eye-tracking in a visual-world paradigm, and is currently in review. (More info under my Research tab!) Now, I am following up on my thesis with a replication-extension in Cantonese-English bilinguals; this study was designed by myself and Lu Liu (UCSB, OSU).

When I’m not in the lab…

…you may find me

• 🎨 Doodling
• 🧗‍♀️ Running or lost on a hiking trail
• 📖 Reading classic sci-fi, fantasy, or comics
• 🎵 Listening to and/or playing music (preferred genres - metal, rock, grunge, punk, alt, indie, or some other variety of those!)
• 🧑‍🍳 Experimenting in the kitchen
• 👾 Video-or-RPG-gaming
• 🪴 Caring for my plant children
• 🐶 Missing my dog, Tauriel (see below!)