I've updated my R code page to include two new functions for conducting mass univariate analyses on ERP data. One function runs the statistics, and the other plots the ERP waveforms with windows of statistical significance, as determined by the mass univariate statistics, as colored bars underneath the waveforms. The mass univariate function includes a variety of possible methods that are explained in more detail in the excellent tutorial published by Groppe et al. (2011). Comments and feedback welcome!

A commentary on the phenomenon of the "bilingual advantage", co-authored with Walter van Heuven, has been published in Cortex. The commentary is a response to a paper by Paap, Johnson & Sawi (2015), also in Cortex, and calls for the literature to adopt new approaches to investigating this popular phenomenon. A link to the published manuscript is available on the Publications page. 

I'll be presenting a poster at the Society for the Neurobiology of Language conference, to be held in Chicago in October, entitled "Visual vs. Linguistic Narrative Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorders". This work is a collaboration with Neil Cohn at UCSD, who studies visual narratives. Go to the Publications page, or stop by my poster at SNL, for more details!

I have a new paper that's just been published, titled "The functional overlap of executive control and language processing in bilinguals". We used conjunction analyses in fMRI to look at how the brain regions involved in linguistic executive control, non-linguistic executive control, and language processing might overlap differently in monolinguals and bilinguals. The main finding was that bilinguals showed overlap of these functions in the left inferior frontal gyrus, whereas monolinguals did not show any overlap. This suggests that bilingualism fundamentally alters the functional interdependence of language and executive control in the bilingual brain. I'm very proud of this study and think it's a fascinating finding!
A link to the publisher's website can be found on the publications page. If you have trouble accessing the full text, please contact me and I can send you a PDF version.

I recently contributed a chapter to a book called "Neuroscience in Intercultural Contexts" about the neuroscience of bilingualism, which has now been published - see the publications page for full details. The book as a whole is very interesting and provides a good introduction to the field of cultural neuroscience - an area I personally didn't know much about. If you get a chance, pick up a copy!

I'll be presenting at the American Neurological Association meeting in Chicago this September! My poster is entitled "Event-Related Potentials as Implicit Measures of Vocabulary in Individuals with Autism" and will be presented on Sunday, September 27th. Come stop by!