Ellen Lau

About

Ellen Lau is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and a member of the Maryland Language Science Center at the University of Maryland. She is also a Co-Director of the KIT-Maryland MEG Lab and faculty in the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science. Her research expertise encompasses neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics, with a focus on understanding neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying language processing. Her work challenges traditional lexicalist models of language by exploring shared neural computations for morphological and syntactic structures, providing evidence for non-lexicalist theories of language comprehension. Lau investigates the boundaries of the binding problem beyond vision, examines processing differences in ergative languages such as Georgian, and studies parallel models of speech perception that incorporate local and global linguistic contexts. Her research also includes the online processing of adjunct control and reference resolution, contributing to a deeper understanding of syntactic and structural influences on language comprehension.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Speech recognition
• Neuroscience
• Communication
• Linguistics
• Cognitive science

Selected publications

• Moving away from lexicalism in psycho- and neuro-linguistics

  Frontiers in Language Sciences · 2023-02-13 · 36 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In standard models of language production or comprehension, the elements which are retrieved from memory and combined into a syntactic structure are “lemmas” or “lexical items.” Such models implicitly take a “lexicalist” approach, which assumes that lexical items store meaning, syntax, and form together, that syntactic and lexical processes are distinct, and that syntactic structure does not extend below the word level. Across the last several decades, linguistic research examining a typological…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• EVEN IN THE BEST-CASE SCENARIO L2 LEARNERS HAVE PERSISTENT DIFFICULTY PERCEIVING AND UTILIZING TONES IN MANDARIN

  Studies in Second Language Acquisition · 2020 · 30 citations

  Abstract Lexical tones are widely believed to be a formidable learning challenge for adult speakers of nontonal languages. While difficulties—as well as rapid improvements—are well documented for beginning second language (L2) learners, research with more advanced learners is needed to understand how tone perception difficulties impact word recognition once learners have a substantial vocabulary. The present study narrows in on difficulties suggested in previous work, which found a dissociation…

  DOI

• Towards Understanding Sustained Neural Activity Across Syntactic Dependencies

  Neurobiology of Language · 2021 · 25 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  ) that do not. We find no SAN associated with subordinating adverbials, contra the syntactic prediction hypothesis. More surprisingly, we observe SANs across matrix questions but not embedded questions. Since both involved identical long-distance dependencies, these results are also inconsistent with the traditional syntactic working memory account of the SAN. We suggest that a more general hypothesis that sustained neural activity supports working memory can be maintained, however, if the susta…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Binding Problem 2.0: Beyond Perceptual Features

  Cognitive Science · 2023-02-01 · 22 citations

  letterOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The "binding problem" has been a central question in vision science for some 30 years: When encoding multiple objects or maintaining them in working memory, how are we able to represent the correspondence between a specific feature and its corresponding object correctly? In this letter we argue that the boundaries of this research program in fact extend far beyond vision, and we call for coordinated pursuit across the broader cognitive science community of this central question for cognition, wh…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Auditory Word Comprehension Is Less Incremental in Isolated Words

  Neurobiology of Language · 2022 · 14 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Partial speech input is often understood to trigger rapid and automatic activation of successively higher-level representations of words, from sound to meaning. Here we show evidence from magnetoencephalography that this type of incremental processing is limited when words are heard in isolation as compared to continuous speech. This suggests a less unified and automatic word recognition process than is often assumed. We present evidence from isolated words that neural effects of phoneme probabi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant F32HD063221

  NIH · $99k · 2013

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Morphosyntactic and Interpretive Dependency Formation in Agreement Attraction

  NSF · $6k · 2017–2018

• Sustained Activity Mechanisms for Neurally Encoding Linguistic Structure

  NSF · $387k · 2018–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Gina R. Kuperberg

  71 shared

• Kirsten Weber

  McMaster University

  65 shared

• Alexandre Gramfort

  50 shared

• Matti Hämäläinen

  Aalto University

  44 shared

• Colin Phillips

  25 shared

• Benjamin Stillerman

  New York University

  20 shared

• Ben Stillerman

  Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging

  12 shared

• Candida Ustine

  Medical College of Wisconsin

  12 shared

Labs

• CLIPPI

Similar researchers at University of Maryland, College Park

• Philip Resnikh-55
• Xiaoyu Yangh-46