Vicky Tzuyin Lai

Interests

Research

Dr. Lai is interested in the cognitive processes and the neural bases of meaning and language in context. Her work so far can be categorized in three areas: (1) Figurative language: How do people process metaphorical language? What is the role of metaphor in the embodied views of language? What are the social-affective functions of metaphors? (2) Emotion and language: How is emotion encoded in language? How do language activities such as reading give rise to emotion? How do readers’ mood states influence meaning making in language? (3) Language and thought in bilinguals: Do differences in languages influence how speakers of those languages perceive and reason about the world?

Teaching

Psychology of Language; Neurobiology of Language; Cognitive Science; Cognitive Neuroscience; Language and Thought

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Lai, V. T., & Coulson, S. (2016). The Metaphorical Brain. Lausanne: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. doi:10.3389/978-2-88919-772-9

Chapters

• Lai, T. Y., Hubbard, R., Ku, L., & Pfeifer, V. (2023). Electrophysiology of non-literal language. In Language Electrified, Techniques, Methods, Applications, and Future Perspectives in the Neurophysiological Investigation of Language Computations. Springer.
• Lai, V. T., & Narasimham, B. (2015). Verb Representation and Thinking-for-Speaking Effects in Spanish–English Bilinguals. In Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing(pp 235-256). Springer International Publishing.
• Lai, V. T., & Chen, A. (2011). Comb or Coat: the Role of Intonation in Online Reference Resolution in a Second Language. In Sound and Sounds(pp 57-68). Utrecht: UiL OTS.
• Lai, V. T., & Frajzyngier, Z. (2009). Change of Functions of the First Person Pronouns in Chinese. In Historical Linguistics(pp 223-232). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Journals/Publications

• Baiocco, L., Pfeifer, V. A., & Lai, V. T. (2025). Metaphor processing is influenced by stimulus emotionality and task demands: Evidence from ERPs. Brain and language, 261, 105530.
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  Past studies showed that metaphoric expressions (e.g., "she was cold to him") require more cognitive-neural effort than literal paraphrases (e.g., "she was indifferent to him"). In event-related potentials (ERP) studies, this was revealed as an N400, a late positivity (LP), and/or a late negativity (LN). We investigated whether stimulus emotionality and task demands influence these ERP correlates and metaphor processing. In Experiment 1, participants read emotional/neutral metaphorical/literal sentences and performed a sensicality judgement task. Emotional metaphors, in comparison to emotional literal sentences, showed a widespread N400 effect (300-450 ms) and a left-anterior LN (450-850 ms). In Experiment 2, participants simply read the sentences and participation was verified by occasional post-trial comprehension questions. Emotional metaphors elicited a more positive LP (450-850 ms) than emotional literal sentences. Findings indicate that stimulus emotionality and task demand co-determine the extent to which emotion- and semantic- related neural resources are recruited during metaphor comprehension.
• Ku, L. C., & Lai, V. T. (2025). Use of context in updating affective representations of words in older adults. Biological psychology, 195, 109003.
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  Older adults (OAs) often prioritize positive over negative information during word processing, termed as positivity bias. However, it is unclear how OAs update the affective representation of a word in contexts. The present study examined whether age-related positivity bias influences the update of the affective representation of a word in different emotional contexts. In Experiment 1 (web-based), younger and older participants read positive and negative target words in positive and negative contexts and rated the valence of the target words. Negative contexts biased the ratings more than positive ones, reflecting a negativity bias during offline valence evaluation in both age groups. In Experiment 2 (EEG), another group of participants read positive and negative target words in positive and negative contexts first, and then the same target words again, and made valence judgment on the target words. OAs showed a larger P2 (180-300 ms) difference before and after contexts for positive target words than younger adults (YAs). This suggests OAs' early attention to positive features of words in contexts. YAs showed a larger late positive complex (LPC) difference for target words before and after negative contexts than before and after positive contexts, while older adults showed comparable LPC effects across all the conditions. This suggests that YAs use negative contexts to update the affective representation of a word, whereas OAs do so in both positive and negative contexts. Our findings supported a reduced negativity bias in OAs in using (emotional) contexts to update the affective neural representation of a word.
• Yu, Y., Krebs, L., Beeman, M., & Lai, V. T. (2025). Hidden Brain States Reveal the Temporal Dynamics of Neural Oscillations During Metaphor Generation and Their Role in Verbal Creativity. Psychophysiology, 62(2), e70023.
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  We investigated the oscillatory brain processes while people generated metaphors for science concepts. Applying a hidden Markov model, we extracted brain states, representing temporally disentangled oscillatory processes, from EEG data. By associating the trial-by-trial occupancy of brain states with the creative quality, novelty, and aptness of the generated metaphors, we identified oscillatory processes that played a role in creative ideation in a data-driven manner. Metaphor novelty was positively associated with occupancy in a state featuring widespread alpha-band synchronization during the early trial stage and occupancy in a state featuring alpha-band desynchronization during the later trial stage. In addition, metaphor novelty was negatively associated with gamma-band power. Our results not only extend previous literature on the role of oscillatory processes in creative ideation but also highlight the importance of temporal dynamics in understanding the brain mechanisms during sustained cognitive task performance.
• Jebahi, F., Lai, V. T., & Kielar, A. (2024). Psycholinguistic predictors of naming accuracy and decline in bilingual logopenic primary progressive aphasia: a cross-linguistic case study. Neurocase, 30(5), 181-188.
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  Naming impairment is a hallmark of logopenic primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA), yet its effects in bilingualism remain understudied. This study examined naming accuracy in a 78-year-old Chinese-English bilingual woman with lvPPA over two years using a modified Boston Naming Test. Naming accuracy was higher in her second, but more frequently used language (English) than her first, but less frequently used language (Chinese). Regression analyses revealed that familiarity predicted naming in Chinese, while word length and age of acquisition influenced English. Decline was linked to age of acquisition in Chinese and emotional properties in English, highlighting language-specific patterns in bilingual lvPPA.
• Pfeifer, V. A., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Lai, V. T. (2024). Can irony regulate negative emotion? Evidence from behaviour and ERPs. Cognition & emotion, 1-11.
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  This study used ratings and event-related potentials (ERPs) to compare the mechanisms through which verbal irony and cognitive reappraisal mitigate negative emotion. Verbal irony is when the literal meaning of words contrasts with their intended meaning. Cognitive reappraisal is when we reconsider emotional stimuli to make them less intense. Our hypothesis was that cognitive reappraisal is a potential mechanism through which irony reduces negative emotion. Participants viewed mildly negative pictures first, then read an ironic or literal statement about it in one block, and used cognitive reappraisal of or attending to the picture in the other block. Participants then viewed the picture for a second time, before rating how negative they felt. Behaviourally, irony reduced negative feelings more than literal statements, and reappraisal reduced negative feelings more than attending, with a larger reduction from reappraisal than from irony. In ERPs, irony elicited a prolonged N400 compared to literal, indexing an initial contrast between picture and word affect and sustained processing of their combination. Cognitive reappraisal elicited a larger late positivity compared to attending at the instruction screen. No differences were found during second picture presentation. These findings suggest that irony and cognitive reappraisal can reduce negative affect in different ways.
• Pfeifer, V. A., Weihs, K. L., & Lai, V. T. (2024). Narratives about Cancer: What Metaphors can tell us about Depressive Symptoms in Breast Cancer Patients. Health communication, 39(9), 1888-1898.
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  Metaphors are pervasive in cancer discourse. However, little is known about how metaphor use develops over time within the same patient, and how metaphor use and its content relate to the mental health of the patient. Here, we analyzed metaphor use in personal essays written by breast cancer patients shortly after the time of diagnosis and nine months later, in relation to their depressive symptoms at both time points. Results show that metaphor use can provide important insight into a patient's current mental state. Specifically, patients who had no change in their depressive symptom levels used metaphors more densely after nine months. In addition, metaphor valence in the later essay was associated with depressive symptoms at study entry and nine months after. Lastly, we observed a shift in metaphor reference pattern for different symptom trajectories, such that those who recovered from initially elevated depressive symptoms used fewer self-referencing metaphors and more cancer-referencing metaphors in their later essay. Our work suggests that metaphor use reflects how a patient is coping with their diagnosis.
• Yu, Y., Krebs, L., Beeman, M., & Lai, V. T. (2024). Exploring How Generating Metaphor Via Insight Versus Analysis Affects Metaphor Quality and Learning Outcomes. Cognitive science, 48(8), e13488.
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  Metaphor generation is both a creative act and a means of learning. When learning a new concept, people often create a metaphor to connect the new concept to existing knowledge. Does the manner in which people generate a metaphor, via sudden insight (Aha! moment) or deliberate analysis, influence the quality of generation and subsequent learning outcomes? According to some research, deliberate processing enhances knowledge retention; hence, generation via analysis likely leads to better concept learning. However, other research has shown that solutions generated via insight are better remembered. In the current study, participants were presented with science concepts and descriptions, then generated metaphors for the concepts. They also indicated how they generated each metaphor and rated their metaphor for novelty and aptness. We assessed participants' learning outcomes with a memory test and evaluated the creative quality of the metaphors based on self- and crowd-sourced ratings. Consistent with the deliberate processing benefit, participants became more familiar with the target science concept if they previously generated a metaphor for the concept via analysis compared to via insight. We also found that metaphors generated via analysis did not differ from metaphors generated via insight in quality (aptness or novelty) nor in how well they were remembered. However, participants' self-evaluations of metaphors generated via insight showed more agreement with independent raters, suggesting the role of insight in modulating the creative ideation process. These preliminary findings have implications for understanding the nature of insight during idea generation and its impact on learning.
• Desai, R. H., Hackett, C. T., Johari, K., Lai, V. T., & Riccardi, N. (2023). Spatiotemporal characteristics of the neural representation of event concepts. Brain and language, 246, 105328.
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  Events are a fundamentally important part of our understanding of the world. How lexical concepts denoting events are represented in the brain remains controversial. We conducted two experiments using event and object nouns matched on a range of psycholinguistic variables, including concreteness, to examine spatial and temporal characteristics of event concepts. Both experiments used magnitude and valence tasks on event and object nouns. The fMRI experiment revealed a distributed set of regions for events, including the angular gyrus, anterior temporal lobe, and posterior cingulate across tasks. In the EEG experiment, events and objects differed in amplitude within the 300-500 ms window. Together these results shed light into the spatiotemporal characteristics of event concept representation and show that event concepts are represented in the putative hubs of the semantic system. While these hubs are typically associated with object semantics, they also represent events, and have a likely role in temporal integration.
• Hubbard, R., Bulkes, N., & Lai, V. T. (2023). Predictability and decomposability separately contribute to compositional processing of idiomatic language. Psychophysiology, e14269.
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  When reading, comprehenders construct a message-level representation and integrate new information as it becomes available. Such compositional processing may differ for idioms, where the meanings of the individual words do not always relate to the figurative meaning. Here, we examined how predictability and idiom decomposability contribute to compositional processing. Participants' EEG was recorded while they read sentences containing idioms that varied in decomposability and phrase-final word cloze probability, or their literal match (break the ice/slip on the ice) with little context prior to the phrase, along with adjective insertion conditions (break the freezing ice/slip on the freezing ice). Cloze probability modulated N400 amplitudes to critical words for both idiomatic and literal phrases, whereas P600 amplitudes only elicited by idiomatic phrases were also modulated. Phrases with adjective insertions reduced acceptability judgments, particularly for idioms, and led to N400 amplitude differences compared to critical words, but only for idioms. N400 differences were also found between idiomatic and literal contexts at the point of adjective insertion. Additionally, both cloze probability and decomposability modulated gamma band activity, with greater gamma activity for more predictable and less decomposable idioms, but at different times and with different scalp topographies, suggesting dissociable components of processing. These results support a hybrid model of processing in which multiple linguistic factors determine the type of processing engaged by the brain to comprehend non-literal language. When prior context is minimal, compositional processing may still be engaged when reading idioms.
• Johari, K., Lai, V. T., Riccardi, N., & Desai, R. H. (2023). Temporal features of concepts are grounded in time perception neural networks: An EEG study. Brain and language, 237, 105220.
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  Experimental evidence suggests that modality-specific concept features such as action, motion, and sound partially rely on corresponding action/perception neural networks in the human brain.Little is known, however, about time-related features of concepts. We examined whether temporal features of concepts recruit networks that subserve time perception in the brain in an EEG study using event and object nouns. Results showed significantly larger ERPs for event duration vs object size judgments over right parietal electrodes, a region associated with temporal processing. Additionally, alpha/beta (10-15 Hz) neural oscillation showed a stronger desynchronization for event duration compared to object size in the right parietal electrodes. This difference was not seen in control tasks comparing event vs object valence, suggesting that it is not likely to reflect a general difference between event and object nouns. These results indicate that temporal features of words may be subserved by time perception circuits in the human brain.
• Donahoo, S. A., Pfeifer, V., & Lai, V. T. (2022). Cursed Concepts: New insights on combinatorial processing from ERP correlates of swearing in context. Brain and language, 226, 105079.
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  Expressives (damn) convey speaker attitude and when used in context (Tom lost the damn dog) can be flexibly applied locally to the noun (dog) or globally to the whole sentence (the situation). We used ERPs to explore brain responses to expressives in sentences. Participants read expressive, descriptive, and pseudoword adjectives followed by nouns in sentences (The damn/black/flerg dog peed on the couch). At the adjective late-positivity-component (LPC), expressives and descriptives showed no difference, suggesting reduced social threat and that readers employ a 'wait-and-see' strategy to interpret expressives. Nouns preceded by expressives elicited a larger frontal P200, as well as reduced N400 and LPC than nouns preceded by descriptives. We associated the frontal P200 with emotional salience, the frontal N400 with mental imagery, and the LPC with cognitive load for combinatorics. We suggest that expressive adjectives are not bound to conceptual integration and conclude that parsers wait-and-see what is being damned.
• Kamenetski, A., Lai, T. Y., & Flecken, M. (2022). Minding the manner: Attention to motion events in Turkish–Dutch early bilinguals. Language and Cognition. Language and Cognition, 14(3), 456 - 478. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2022.10
• Ku, L. C., Allen, J. J., & Lai, V. T. (2022). Attention and regulation during emotional word comprehension in older adults: Evidence from event-related potentials and brain oscillations. Brain and language, 227, 105086.
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  Older adults often show a positivity bias effect during picture processing, focusing more on positive than negative information. It is unclear whether this positivity bias effect generalizes to language and whether arousal matters. The present study investigated how age affects emotional word comprehension with varied valence (positive, negative) and arousal (high, low). We recorded older and younger participants' brainwaves (EEG) while they read positive/negative and high/low-arousing words and pseudowords, and made word/non-word judgments. Older adults showed increased N400s and left frontal alpha decreases (300-450 ms) for low-arousing positive as compared to low-arousing negative words, suggesting an arousal-dependent positivity bias during lexical retrieval. Both age groups showed similar LPPs to negative words. Older adults further showed a larger mid-frontal theta increase (500-700 ms) than younger adults for low-arousing negative words, possibly indicating down-regulation of negative meanings of low-arousing words. Altogether, our data supported the strength and vulnerability integration model of aging.
• Lai, V. T., Berkum, J., & Hagoort, P. (2022). Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge. Frontiers in Communication, 7, 262.
• Sendek, K., Herzmann, G., Pfeifer, V., & Lai, V. T. (2022). Social acquisition context matters: Increased neural responses for native but not nonnative taboo words. Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 22(2), 362-382.
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  This study examined whether the context of acquisition of a word influences its visual recognition and subsequent processing. We utilized taboo words, whose meanings are typically acquired socially, to ensure that differences in processing were based on learned social taboo, rather than proficiency. American English-speaking participants made word/non-word decisions on American taboo (native dialect), British taboo (non-native dialect), positive, neutral, and pseudo- words while EEG was recorded. Taboo words were verified as taboo by both American and British English speakers in an independent norming survey. American taboo words showed a more positive amplitude of the Late Positive Complex (LPC), a neural correlate of emotionality and social processing, compared with British taboo words and all other word categories. Moreover, in an item-wise analysis, LPC amplitudes of American taboo words were positively correlated with their taboo ratings. British taboo words did not show this effect. This indicates that American participants, who had very limited social contact with British English, did not have the same perception of social threat from British taboo words as they had from American taboo words. These results point to the importance of social context of acquisition in establishing social-affective meaning in language.
• Hakim, Z. M., Ebner, N. C., Oliveira, D. S., Getz, S. J., Levin, B. E., Lin, T., Lloyd, K., Lai, V. T., Grilli, M. D., & Wilson, R. C. (2021). The Phishing Email Suspicion Test (PEST) a lab-based task for evaluating the cognitive mechanisms of phishing detection. Behavior research methods, 53(3), 1342-1352.
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  Phishing emails constitute a major problem, linked to fraud and exploitation as well as subsequent negative health outcomes including depression and suicide. Because of their sheer volume, and because phishing emails are designed to deceive, purely technological solutions can only go so far, leaving human judgment as the last line of defense. However, because it is difficult to phish people in the lab, little is known about the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying phishing susceptibility. There is therefore a critical need to develop an ecologically valid lab-based measure of phishing susceptibility that will allow evaluation of the cognitive mechanisms involved in phishing detection. Here we present such a measure based on a task, the Phishing Email Suspicion Test (PEST), and a cognitive model to quantify behavior. In PEST, participants rate a series of phishing and non-phishing emails according to their level of suspicion. By comparing suspicion scores for each email to its real-world efficacy, we find initial support for the ecological validity of PEST - phishing emails that were more effective in the real world were more effective at deceiving people in the lab. In the proposed computational model, we quantify behavior in terms of participants' overall level of suspicion of emails, their ability to distinguish phishing from non-phishing emails, and the extent to which emails from the recent past bias their current decision. Together, our task and model provide a framework for studying the cognitive neuroscience of phishing detection.
• Pfeifer, V. A., & Lai, V. T. (2021). The comprehension of irony in high and low emotional contexts. Canadian journal of experimental psychology = Revue canadienne de psychologie experimentale, 75(2), 120-125.
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  Verbal irony is when words intend the opposite of their literal meaning. We investigated the emotional function of irony by asking whether irony intensifies or mitigates negative feelings. Experiment 1 used ratings to assess the mental state of a speaker using irony or literal language following a negative event in either a high- or a low-emotional context. We found that regardless of context emotionality, speakers using irony were perceived as being in a less negative and less aroused mental state than speakers using literal language. In Experiment 2, we examined the time course of this process with ERPs. Initially, literal statements elicited a larger N100 than irony, regardless of context emotionality, suggesting that irony mitigates negative feelings overall. Later on, irony elicited a larger LPC than literal statements in high emotion contexts, but not in low emotion contexts. This suggests that irony required more mental state processing or/and more speaker emotion processing than literal language in emotionally loaded situations. These results indicate that whether irony intensifies or mitigates negative feelings depends on context and the point in time at which we assess its function. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
• Pfeifer, V. A., Armstrong, E. L., & Lai, T. Y. (2022). Do all facial emojis communicate emotion? The impact of facial emojis on perceived sender emotion and text processing.. Computers in Human Behavior, 126, 107016. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.107016
• Pfeifer, V., & Lai, V. T. (2021). The Comprehension of Irony in High and Low Emotional Contexts. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology.
• Sendek, K., Pfeifer, V. A., Herzmann, G., & Lai, T. Y. (2021). Social acquisition context matters: Increased neural responses for native but not non-native taboo words. Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, 1-21. doi:https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-021-00951-4
• Donahoo, S. A., & Lai, T. Y. (2020). The mental representation and social aspect of expressives. Cognition and Emotion, 1-16.
• Donahoo, S. A., & Lai, V. T. (2020). The mental representation and social aspect of expressives. Cognition & emotion, 34(7), 1423-1438.
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  Despite increased focus on emotional language, research lacks for the most emotional language: Swearing. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether swear words have content distinct from function words, and if so, whether this content is emotional or social in nature. Stimuli included swear (e.g. , ), negative but non-swear (e.g. , ), open-class neutral (e.g. , ), and closed-class neutral words (e.g. , ). Behaviourally, swears were recognised slower than valence- and arousal- matched negative words, meaning that there is more to the expressive dimension than merely a heightened emotional state. In ERPs, both swears and negative words elicited a larger positivity (250-550 ms) than open-class neutral words. Later, swears elicited a larger late positivity (550-750 ms) than negative words. We associate the earlier positivity effect with attention due to negative valence, and the later positivity effect with pragmatics due to social tabooness. Our findings suggest a view in which expressives are not merely function words or emotional words. Rather, expressives are emotionally and socially significant. Swears are more than what is indicated by valence ore arousal alone.
• Hakim, Z. M., Ebner, N. C., Oliveira, D. S., Getz, S. J., Levin, B. E., Lin, T., Lloyd, K., Grilli, M. D., Lai, V. T., & Wilson, R. C. (2020). The Phishing Email Suspicion Test (PEST) a lab-based task for evaluating the cognitive mechanisms of phishing detection. Behavior Research Methods, 1-11. doi:https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01495-0
• Ku, L. C., Chan, S. H., & Lai, V. T. (2020). Personality Traits and Emotional Word Recognition: An ERP Study. Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 20(2), 371-386.
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  Recent research has investigated how personality trait differences influence the processing of emotion conveyed by pictures, but limited research has examined the emotion conveyed by words. The present study investigated whether extraversion (extroverts vs. introverts) and neuroticism (high neurotics vs. low neurotics) influence the processing of positive, neutral, and negative words that were matched for arousal. Electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded from healthy participants while they performed a lexical decision task. We found that personality traits influenced emotional word recognition at N400 (300-450 ms) and LPC (450-800 ms). At the earlier (N400) stage, the more extraverted and neurotic a participant was, the more reduced the N400s for the positive words relative to neutral words were. This suggests that the extroverts and high neurotics (i.e., high impulsivity) identified positive content in words during lexical feature retrieval, which facilitated such retrieval. At the later (LPC) stage, both the introverts and high neurotics (i.e., high anxiety) showed greater LPCs to negative than neutral words, indicating their sustained attention and elaborative processing of negative information. These results suggest that extraversion and neuroticism collectively influence different stages of emotional word recognition in a way that is consistent with Gray's biopsychological theory of personality.
• Ku, L., Chan, S., & Lai, T. Y. (2020). Personality traits and emotional word recognition: An ERP study. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 1-16.
• Lai, V. T., Howerton, O., & Desai, R. H. (2019). Concrete processing of action metaphors: Evidence from ERP. Brain research, 1714, 202-209.
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  The timing of sensory-motor activation during the comprehension of action verbs used in a metaphorical sense is not well understood. In the present Event Related Potential (ERP) study, participants read verbs in metaphoric (The church bent the rules), literal-concrete (The bodyguard bent the rod), and literal-abstract (The church altered the rules) conditions. The literal concreteness effect, obtained by subtracting the abstract from the concrete, was revealed as an N400, frontally distributed. A metaphoric effect, obtained in the metaphor-abstract contrast, was a widespread N400, and included the frontal response seen in the literal concreteness effect. Another metaphoric effect, obtained in the metaphor-concrete contrast, was a posterior N400. Further time window analyses showed that the literal concreteness effect primarily came from 200 to 300 ms, the metaphoric-concrete effect primarily came from 200 to 400 ms, and the metaphoric-abstract effect was significant throughout 200-500 ms. These results suggest that a concrete but underspecified meaning consistent with metaphoric and literal readings, was activated early and was sustained throughout the 200-500 ms window. We concluded that the metaphoric sense is based in concrete action semantics, even if these senses are underspecified.
• van Dam, W. O., Speed, L. J., Lai, V. T., Vigliocco, G., & Desai, R. H. (2017). Effects of motion speed in action representations. Brain and language, 168, 47-56.
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  Grounded cognition accounts of semantic representation posit that brain regions traditionally linked to perception and action play a role in grounding the semantic content of words and sentences. Sensory-motor systems are thought to support partially abstract simulations through which conceptual content is grounded. However, which details of sensory-motor experience are included in, or excluded from these simulations, is not well understood. We investigated whether sensory-motor brain regions are differentially involved depending on the speed of actions described in a sentence. We addressed this issue by examining the neural signature of relatively fast (The old lady scurried across the road) and slow (The old lady strolled across the road) action sentences. The results showed that sentences that implied fast motion modulated activity within the right posterior superior temporal sulcus and the angular and middle occipital gyri, areas associated with biological motion and action perception. Sentences that implied slow motion resulted in greater signal within the right primary motor cortex and anterior inferior parietal lobule, areas associated with action execution and planning. These results suggest that the speed of described motion influences representational content and modulates the nature of conceptual grounding. Fast motion events are represented more visually whereas motor regions play a greater role in representing conceptual content associated with slow motion.
• Coulson, S., & Lai, V. T. (2016). Editorial: The Metaphorical Brain. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9.
• Desai, R. H., Choi, W., Lai, V. T., & Henderson, J. M. (2016). Toward Semantics in the Wild: Activation to Manipulable Nouns in Naturalistic Reading. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 36(14), 4050-5.
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  The neural basis of language processing, in the context of naturalistic reading of connected text, is a crucial but largely unexplored area. Here we combined functional MRI and eye tracking to examine the reading of text presented as whole paragraphs in two experiments with human subjects. We registered high-temporal resolution eye-tracking data to a low-temporal resolution BOLD signal to extract responses to single words during naturalistic reading where two to four words are typically processed per second. As a test case of a lexical variable, we examined the response to noun manipulability. In both experiments, signal in the left anterior inferior parietal lobule and posterior inferior temporal gyrus and sulcus was positively correlated with noun manipulability. These regions are associated with both action performance and action semantics, and their activation is consistent with a number of previous studies involving tool words and physical tool use. The results show that even during rapid reading of connected text, where semantics of words may be activated only partially, the meaning of manipulable nouns is grounded in action performance systems. This supports the grounded cognition view of semantics, which posits a close link between sensory-motor and conceptual systems of the brain. On the methodological front, these results demonstrate that BOLD responses to lexical variables during naturalistic reading can be extracted by simultaneous use of eye tracking. This opens up new avenues for the study of language and reading in the context of connected text.
• Lai, V. T., & Desai, R. H. (2016). The grounding of temporal metaphors. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 76, 43-50.
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  Grounded cognition suggests that the processing of conceptual knowledge cued by language relies on the sensory-motor regions. Does temporal language similarly engage brain areas involved in time perception? Participants read sentences that describe the temporal extent of events with motion verbs (The hours crawled until the release of the news) and their static controls. Comparison conditions were fictive motion (The trail crawled until the end of the hills) and literal motion (The caterpillar crawled towards the top of the tree), along with their static controls. Several time sensitive locations, identified using a meta-analysis, showed activation specific to temporal metaphors, including in the left insula, right claustrum, and bilateral posterior superior temporal sulci. Fictive and literal motion contrasts did not show this difference. Fictive motion contrast showed activation in a conceptual motion sensitive area of the left posterior inferior temporal sulcus (ITS). These data suggest that language of time is at least partially grounded in experiential time. In addition, motion semantics has different consequences for events and objects: temporal events become animate, while static entities become motional.
• Lai, V. T., & Huettig, F. (2016). When prediction is fulfilled: Insight from emotion processing. Neuropsychologia, 85, 110-7.
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  Research on prediction in language processing has focused predominantly on the function of predictive context and less on the potential contribution of the predicted word. The present study investigated how meaning that is not immediately prominent in the contents of predictions but is part of the predicted words influences sentence processing. We used emotional meaning to address this question. Participants read emotional and neutral words embedded in highly predictive and non-predictive sentential contexts, with the two sentential contexts rated similarly for their emotional ratings. Event Related Potential (ERP) effects of prediction and emotion both started at ~200ms. Confirmed predictions elicited larger P200s than violated predictions when the target words were non-emotional (neutral), but such an effect was absent when the target words were emotional. Likewise, emotional words elicited larger P200s than neutral words when the target words were non-predictive, but such effect were absent when the contexts were predictive. We conjecture that the prediction and emotion effects at ~200ms may share similar neural process(es). We suggest that such process(es) could be affective, where confirmed predictions and word emotion give rise to 'aha' or rewarding feelings, and/or cognitive, where both prediction and word emotion quickly engage attention.
• Coulson, S., & Lai, V. T. (2015). Editorial: The Metaphorical Brain. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 9, 699.
• Lai, V. T., Willems, R. M., & Hagoort, P. (2015). Feel between the lines: implied emotion in sentence comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 27(8), 1528-41.
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  This study investigated the brain regions for the comprehension of implied emotion in sentences. Participants read negative sentences without negative words, for example, "The boy fell asleep and never woke up again," and their neutral counterparts "The boy stood up and grabbed his bag." This kind of negative sentence allows us to examine implied emotion derived at the sentence level, without associative emotion coming from word retrieval. We found that implied emotion in sentences, relative to neutral sentences, led to activation in some emotion-related areas, including the medial prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the insula, as well as certain language-related areas, including the inferior frontal gyrus, which has been implicated in combinatorial processing. These results suggest that the emotional network involved in implied emotion is intricately related to the network for combinatorial processing in language, supporting the view that sentence meaning is more than simply concatenating the meanings of its lexical building blocks.
• Lai, V. T., van, D. W., Conant, L. L., Binder, J. R., & Desai, R. H. (2015). Familiarity differentially affects right hemisphere contributions to processing metaphors and literals. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9.
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  The role of the two hemispheres in processing metaphoric language is controversial. While some studies have reported a special role of the right hemisphere (RH) in processing metaphors, others indicate no difference in laterality relative to literal language. Some studies have found a role of the RH for novel/unfamiliar metaphors, but not conventional/familiar metaphors. It is not clear, however, whether the role of the RH is specific to metaphor novelty, or whether it reflects processing, reinterpretation or reanalysis of novel/unfamiliar language in general. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the effects of familiarity in both metaphoric and non-metaphoric sentences. A left lateralized network containing the middle and inferior frontal gyri, posterior temporal regions in the left hemisphere (LH), and inferior frontal regions in the RH, was engaged across both metaphoric and non-metaphoric sentences; engagement of this network decreased as familiarity decreased. No region was engaged selectively for greater metaphoric unfamiliarity. An analysis of laterality, however, showed that the contribution of the RH relative to that of LH does increase in a metaphor-specific manner as familiarity decreases. These results show that RH regions, taken by themselves, including commonly reported regions such as the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), are responsive to increased cognitive demands of processing unfamiliar stimuli, rather than being metaphor-selective. The division of labor between the two hemispheres, however, does shift towards the right for metaphoric processing. The shift results not because the RH contributes more to metaphoric processing. Rather, relative to its contribution for processing literals, the LH contributes less.
• Samur, D., Lai, V. T., Hagoort, P., & Willems, R. M. (2015). Emotional context modulates embodied metaphor comprehension. Neuropsychologia, 78, 108-14.
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  Emotions are often expressed metaphorically, and both emotion and metaphor are ways through which abstract meaning can be grounded in language. Here we investigate specifically whether motion-related verbs when used metaphorically are differentially sensitive to a preceding emotional context, as compared to when they are used in a literal manner. Participants read stories that ended with ambiguous action/motion sentences (e.g., he got it), in which the action/motion could be interpreted metaphorically (he understood the idea) or literally (he caught the ball) depending on the preceding story. Orthogonal to the metaphorical manipulation, the stories were high or low in emotional content. The results showed that emotional context modulated the neural response in visual motion areas to the metaphorical interpretation of the sentences, but not to their literal interpretations. In addition, literal interpretations of the target sentences led to stronger activation in the visual motion areas as compared to metaphorical readings of the sentences. We interpret our results as suggesting that emotional context specifically modulates mental simulation during metaphor processing.
• Lai, V. T., Rodriguez, G. G., & Narasimhan, B. (2014). Thinking-for-speaking in early and late bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 17(1), 139-152.
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  When speakers describe motion events using different languages, they subsequently classify those events in language-specific ways (Gennari, Sloman, Malt & Fitch, 2002). Here we ask if bilingual speakers flexibly shift their event classification preferences based on the language in which they verbally encode those events. English–Spanish bilinguals and monolingual controls described motion events in either Spanish or English. Subsequently they judged the similarity of the motion events in a triad task. Bilinguals tested in Spanish and Spanish monolinguals were more likely to make similarity judgments based on the path of motion versus bilinguals tested in English and English monolinguals. The effect is modulated in bilinguals by the age of acquisition of the second language. Late bilinguals based their judgments on path more often when Spanish was used to describe the motion events versus English. Early bilinguals had a path preference independent of the language in use. These findings support “thinking-for-speaking” (Slobin, 1996) in late bilinguals.
• Lai, V. T., & Boroditsky, L. (2013). The immediate and chronic influence of spatio-temporal metaphors on the mental representations of time in english, mandarin, and mandarin-english speakers. Frontiers in psychology, 4, 142.
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  In this paper we examine whether experience with spatial metaphors for time has an influence on people's representation of time. In particular we ask whether spatio-temporal metaphors can have both chronic and immediate effects on temporal thinking. In Study 1, we examine the prevalence of ego-moving representations for time in Mandarin speakers, English speakers, and Mandarin-English (ME) bilinguals. As predicted by observations in linguistic analyses, we find that Mandarin speakers are less likely to take an ego-moving perspective than are English speakers. Further, we find that ME bilinguals tested in English are less likely to take an ego-moving perspective than are English monolinguals (an effect of L1 on meaning-making in L2), and also that ME bilinguals tested in Mandarin are more likely to take an ego-moving perspective than are Mandarin monolinguals (an effect of L2 on meaning-making in L1). These findings demonstrate that habits of metaphor use in one language can influence temporal reasoning in another language, suggesting the metaphors can have a chronic effect on patterns in thought. In Study 2 we test Mandarin speakers using either horizontal or vertical metaphors in the immediate context of the task. We find that Mandarin speakers are more likely to construct front-back representations of time when understanding front-back metaphors, and more likely to construct up-down representations of time when understanding up-down metaphors. These findings demonstrate that spatio-temporal metaphors can also have an immediate influence on temporal reasoning. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the metaphors we use to talk about time have both immediate and long-term consequences for how we conceptualize and reason about this fundamental domain of experience.
• Lai, V. T., & Curran, T. (2013). ERP evidence for conceptual mappings and comparison processes during the comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors. Brain and Language, 127(3), 484-96.
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  Cognitive linguists suggest that understanding metaphors requires activation of conceptual mappings between the involved concepts. We tested whether mappings are indeed in use during metaphor comprehension, and what mapping means as a cognitive process with Event-Related Potentials. Participants read literal, conventional metaphorical, novel metaphorical, and anomalous target sentences preceded by primes with related or unrelated mappings. Experiment 1 used sentence-primes to activate related mappings, and Experiment 2 used simile-primes to induce comparison thinking. In the unprimed conditions of both experiments, metaphors elicited N400s more negative than the literals. In Experiment 1, related sentence-primes reduced the metaphor-literal N400 difference in conventional, but not in novel metaphors. In Experiment 2, related simile-primes reduced the metaphor-literal N400 difference in novel, but not clearly in conventional metaphors. We suggest that mapping as a process occurs in metaphors, and the ways in which it can be facilitated by comparison differ between conventional and novel metaphors.
• Kim, A., & Lai, V. (2012). Rapid Interactions between Lexical Semantic and Word Form Analysis during Word Recognition in Context: Evidence from ERPs. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 24(5), 1104-1112.
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  We used ERPs to investigate the time course of interactions between lexical semantic and sublexical visual word form processing during word recognition. Participants read sentence-embedded pseudowords that orthographically resembled a contextually supported real word (e.g., “She measured the flour so she could bake a ceke...”) or did not (e.g., “She measured the flour so she could bake a tont...”) along with nonword consonant strings (e.g., “She measured the flour so she could bake a srdt...”). Pseudowords that resembled a contextually supported real word (“ceke”) elicited an enhanced positivity at 130 msec (P130), relative to real words (e.g., “She measured the flour so she could bake a cake...”). Pseudowords that did not resemble a plausible real word (“tont”) enhanced the N170 component, as did nonword consonant strings (“srdt”). The effect pattern shows that the visual word recognition system is, perhaps, counterintuitively, more rapidly sensitive to minor than to flagrant deviations from contextually predicted inputs. The findings are consistent with rapid interactions between lexical and sublexical representations during word recognition, in which rapid lexical access of a contextually supported word (CAKE) provides top–down excitation of form features (“cake”), highlighting the anomaly of an unexpected word “ceke.”
• Lai, V. T., Hagoort, P., & Casasanto, D. (2012). Affective Primacy vs. Cognitive Primacy: Dissolving the Debate. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 243.
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  When people see a snake, they are likely to activate both affective information (e.g., dangerous) and non-affective information about its ontological category (e.g., animal). According to the Affective Primacy Hypothesis, the affective information has priority, and its activation can precede identification of the ontological category of a stimulus. Alternatively, according to the Cognitive Primacy Hypothesis, perceivers must know what they are looking at before they can make an affective judgment about it. We propose that neither hypothesis holds at all times. Here we show that the relative speed with which affective and non-affective information gets activated by pictures and words depends upon the contexts in which stimuli are processed. Results illustrate that the question of whether affective information has processing priority over ontological information (or vice versa) is ill-posed. Rather than seeking to resolve the debate over Cognitive vs. Affective Primacy in favor of one hypothesis or the other, a more productive goal may be to determine the factors that cause affective information to have processing priority in some circumstances and ontological information in others. Our findings support a view of the mind according to which words and pictures activate different neurocognitive representations every time they are processed, the specifics of which are co-determined by the stimuli themselves and the contexts in which they occur.
• Lai, V. T., Curran, T., & Menn, L. (2009). Comprehending conventional and novel metaphors: an ERP study. Brain Research, 1284, 145-55.
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  The neural mechanisms underlying the processing of conventional and novel conceptual metaphorical sentences were examined with event-related potentials (ERPs). Conventional metaphors were created based on the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor and were operationally defined as familiar and readily interpretable. Novel metaphors were unfamiliar and harder to interpret. Using a sensicality judgment task, we compared ERPs elicited by the same target word when it was used to end anomalous, novel metaphorical, conventional metaphorical and literal sentences. Amplitudes of the N400 ERP component (320-440 ms) were more negative for anomalous sentences, novel metaphors, and conventional metaphors compared with literal sentences. Within a later window (440-560 ms), ERPs associated with conventional metaphors converged to the same level as literal sentences while the novel metaphors stayed anomalous throughout. The reported results were compatible with models assuming an initial stage for metaphor mappings from one concept to another and that these mappings are cognitively taxing.

Proceedings Publications

• Lai, V. T., Peter, H., & Daniel, C. (2011, July). Affective and Non-Affective Meaning in Words and Pictures. In the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 390-395.
• Monro, R., Bethard, S., Kuperman, V., Lai, V. T., Melnick, R., Potts, C., Schnoebelen, T., & Tily, H. (2010, June). Crowdsourcing and Language Studies: The New Generation of Linguistic Data. In Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data With Amazon's Mechanical Turk, North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL).
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  We present a compendium of recent and currentprojects that utilize crowdsourcing technologiesfor language studies, finding that thequality is comparable to controlled laboratoryexperiments, and in some cases superior.While crowdsourcing has primarily been usedfor annotation in recent language studies, theresults here demonstrate that far richer datamay be generated in a range of linguistic disciplinesfrom semantics to psycholinguistics.For these, we report a number of successfulmethods for evaluating data quality in the absenceof a ‘correct’ response for any givendata point.

Presentations

• Lai, T. Y. (2020, February). Thinking and feeling with metaphors. Departmental ColloquiumSpeech Language Hearing Sciences, University of Arizona.
• Lai, T. Y. (2019, June). How the brain finds meaning in metaphors of language. Spirit of the Senses Salon: Social Experience of Art, Science, and Cultural. Phoenix.
• Lai, V. T., Mehl, M. R., Bulkes, N., Kumar, A., & Ku, L. (2019, November). The expressive and regulatory roles of metaphor for emotion. The 60th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Montreal, Canada: Psychonomic Society.
• Lai, V. T., Bulkes, N., Trocoso, C., Morez, T., Kumar, A., & Armstrong, E. (2018, March). Changes in the neural representations of abstract science concepts after metaphoric reasoning. The 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. San Francisco: Cognitive Neuroscience Society.
• Lai, T. Y. (2017, March). Language and emotion. Departmental ColloquiumDepartment of Psychology, University of Arizona.