Introduction and Overview

Welcome to the Cognition and Language Laboratory. The Laboratory has been in existence for nearly 15 years, at the University at Albany.

Over the years, the interests of the Laboratory have grown and expanded from basic issues in language and information processing to their application in a broad range of settings. The Laboratory is directed by Dr. Jeanette Altarriba, Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, College of Arts and Sciences. Under her direction, seven students have earned their Masters of Arts Degrees in Cognitive Psychology and four, their Doctor of Philosophy Degrees. Additional three students are now currently working towards their doctorates. The Laboratory houses both undergraduate and graduate research assistants, and has ample facilities and resources for the design and implementation of a variety of different experimental paradigms in the fields of memory, language, cognition, and perception.

Laboratory Members

Some of the main areas of interest that have been pursued within the Laboratory include monolingual and bilingual word processing, second language acquisition, emotion word memory in monolingual and bilingual speakers, code-switching and language-mixing in applied settings, and lexical ambiguity within and between languages. Some of the methods or tasks that have been used include lexical decision, pronunciation or naming, Stroop interference, RSVP, and translation recognition, just to name a few.
 

Current Research

Current experiments seek to understand the ways in which emotion words and emotion-laden words are coded in monolinguals as well as in the dominant vs. subordinate languages of fluent bilinguals, the differences in mental representations for concrete, abstract, and emotion words for novice and fluent bilinguals, tip-of-the-tongue phenomena in bilingual speakers, use of spatial and temporal language cues in the representation of spatial and temporal information, the acquisition of ASL signs in monolingual English speakers, and many other areas of inquiry. We are a Laboratory with diverse interests, and we seek not only to provide new, original, basic research findings, but also to describe the ways in which those findings apply to important and timely issues in everyday life.