Associate Professor of Psychology

Department of Psychology, Boston University
64 Cummington St., Boston, MA 02215
Email:charris@bu.edu

Office: Rm 123, Phone: (617) 353-2956, Lab: Rms 127-129

Curriculum vitae

Information about Research Internships

Psycholingustics Lab (page under development)

Media and web

Research and Background

I was trained at UC San Diego, 1985-1991, where I studied under the guidance of Elizabeth Bates, Jeff Elman, David Rumelhart, Rama Ramachandran, Ronald Langacker, Patricia Churchland and (via CMU) Brian MacWhinney and Jay McClelland (and of course many other wonderful teachers and scholars). I have been a faculty member at BU since 1991.

My research interests are broad, encompassing diverse aspects of language processing, including second language acquisition, emotional aspects of language, and word recognition. I am the first researcher to document that emotion words elicit larger skin conductance responses in a first language than in a second (see paper in Applied Psycholinguistics, pdf). I am currently studying emotional reactivity in the U.S. for speakers who grew up speaking Russian, Mandarin, or Spanish, as well as English native speakers who learned Russian as a foreign langauge (see powerpoint presentation for overview of this research and forthcoming paper on lying in native vs. foreign language). See also a recent powerpoint which discusses the role of motivation in second language acquisition. I am also interested in how units larger than single words are important for fluency and efficiency in all types of language processing (for both first and second language).

In word recognition, I have expertise in an intriguing visual/cognition illusion called repetition blindness. I have shown how illusory words can be created by embedding word fragments in the visual stream, as in "pain grain avy" (leads to report of "gravy" (see, for example, my paper with Alison Morris, in pdf). I have used repetition blindness and the same/difference task to investigate how diacritic letters are represented in Turkish. With German colleagues Martin Heil and Michael Niedeggen I have used this technique to explore consciousness (see our paper in Neuroreport). We conclude that what viewers perceive is more important for subsequent brain states and processing than what is actually in the visual input. A new model of repetition blindness and orthographic priming appeared in 2009 in the journal Cognitive Psychology.

In my cross-cultural research, I am the originator (with Ayse Aycicegi) of the Personality-Culture Clash hypothesis. We propose that mental health is facilitated by having a personality in tune with cultural values.

I currently supervise three doctoral students: Hui-wen Cheng (semantic and phonological activation during Chinese vs. English reading), Jimmy Tong (video games as the ideal internvetion for foreign langauge learning), and Naomi Berlove (hearing children of deaf adults). I hope to recruit a new doctoral student to work with me in Fall 2010.

In addition to topics listed in my current and prior conferences list, I am available to speak on advertising to Bilingual populations, processing simplified and traditional Chinese (abstract), and current perspectives on evolutionary psychology.

Conferences & Colloquia, 2008-2010

Event	Location	Date	Topic	Co-authors
Invited colloquium, Bangor University	Wales	March 7, 2009	The difficulty of acquiring a second language in adulthood: Is emotionally-mediated learning the missing ingredient?	abstract
Invited colloquium, Autism Research Center	University of Cambridge	March 13, 2009	Born on the wrong planet? Using forum postings to test hypotheses about special interests and religious beliefs of autistic spectrum young adults (abstract)	Caitlin Murphy, Choe Jordan
Cognitive and Neural Systems	Boston	May 26-29, 2009	3 papers: Non-native speech perception in noise; Lying and emotion in a non-natve language; Processing simplified and tradition Chinese scripts	With Ayse Aycicegi-Dinn; Hui-wen Cheng
Psychonomics Society Meeting	Boston	Nov 19-2, 2009	Breaking the language barrier: Social interactivity improves adult language learning	Tong, Dahlen, Stone, Chu
TESOL (pending)	Boston	March 24-27 2010	Promoting Teaching Methods and Materials for ASL-English Education	Snodden, Hoffmeister, Kuntze...
TESOL (pending)	Boston	March 24-27 2010	Social Interactivity in Virtual Settings for Adult Language Learning	Jimmy Tong
Cognitive Neuroscience Society (in preparation)	Montreal	April 2010	Autism	Chloe Jordan, Caitlin Murphy

Prior Conferences

Misc. iems of Interest:
The great minds at MIT linguistics wondered, on October 19, 2007, "Have we all been wrong?" See notes from Hockett's review of Chomsky's linguistic theory (html) from his State of the Art book 4 decades ago.
Or if you want child language acquisition data, see the Bates and MacWhinney classic 1987 paper (pdf), only 20 years old...
Why so slow? Video of Virginia Valian's lecture at MIT