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, cognition, and memory.

Research Interests

My primary research interests center around modeling the neurocognitive changes that occur in healthy and impaired aging, as well as addressing cognitive-communicational deficits that occur as a result of these changes.

Currently, as an NSF GRFP fellow, I work with healthy younger adults to clarify the neurocognitive mechanisms behind language processing and memory in complex encoding environments. Predictive preactivation ability serves as a temporally-sensitive proxy for quantifying language processing, which I am monitoring in an eye-tracking VWP across various levels of contextual richness (e.g. unimodal v. multimodal). Cognitive aging processes and methodological inconsistencies play a role in mixed findings regarding predictive preactivation efficacy in older adults, so I will replicate my study in healthy older adults after establishing a baseline in a younger population. Furthermore, I plan to extend my research into EEG/ERP for more comprehensive subsequent studies.

I aim to integrate the research and clinical spheres through basic science research, capturing the dynamic and individual-specific nature of language use across the lifespan in populations with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and/or Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Ultimately, my findings will have implications for more thorough diagnosis of neurodegenerative disease and improved patient outcomes (via cognitive-communicational scaffolding techniques to preserve independence and memory post-diagnosis).

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!)