Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory 

Lab JMD1

What is the CNLL?

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory (CNLL) was established at UNNC in 2012, when our Behavioural Lab was set up to measure accuracy and reaction times in Psycholinguistics experiments. Then in 2013 our Electrophysiology Lab was inaugurated, providing facilities to measure brain electrical patterns, using  electroencephalography /event-related potentials (EEG/ERPs).

Since then, as well as providing facilities for experimental research and undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and learning  in the area of Cognitive Neuroscience,  the CNLL has attracted a great deal of attention from external researchers in China and abroad. We regularly have short and longer-term research visitors and are always involved in collaborative projects with prestigious neuroscience research centres and universities in China, Europe and world-wide.

These international, interdisciplinary collaborations have resulted in high impact-factor publications on topics such as identifying the brain correlates of bilingual and monolingual language processing, developing multilingual data banks, exploring the factors influencing children’s processing of mathematics across different countries, and investigating the effects across the lifespan of language learning and other types of cognitive training, among other research directions.

Why do we have a Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab at UNNC? 

Brain research is one of the key areas for research in the 21st century, with the EU’s Human Brain Project (1.3 billion dollars) and the USA’s Brain Initiative (100million dollars) indicating the importance of this research area internationally. The Chinese government is also aware of the benefits to be obtained from research in this area and is promoting this type of research. In the applied areas of Teaching and Learning and Public Health, it is now generally accepted that far more research is needed into how the brain learns and how this potential can be developed not only in childhood but across the lifespan into old age, providing benefits of greater mental and physical health, and reducing the economic and social costs to society of the inevitable aging of our populations. The research in our lab is related to precisely these areas-multilingual language processing, brain and communication across the lifespan, aging and learning, language  challenges such as dyslexia, specific language impairment, etc., as well as inter-disciplinary research into  brain-computer interfaces, neuroeconomics, and other fascinating, cutting-edge areas of research.

Selection of recent CNLL projects and publications:

  • 2022-2023  Cognispan:  Exploring the effects of using AAP-based cognitive training programmes to improve thinking skills in younger and older populations (ongoing project) 
  • 2020-2022 The Multilingual Picture Database  Duñabeitia et.al  (Submitted to Scientific Data) pre-print available at: https://psyarxiv.com/x9c5p 
  • 2019-2022 Factors Associated with Children’s Understanding of Mathematical Equivalence: An Investigation across Six Countries  Şimşek E.,  Xenidou-Dervou.I., Hunter, J., Gillon Dowens, M., Suk Pang, J., Lee, Y., McNeil,N. ,Kirkland, P., & Jones, I. In: Journal of Educational Psychology (in press)
  • 2019-2020 Complex brain activity analysis and recognition based on multiagent methods Zhang, H. L., Liu, J. & Gillon Dowens, M., 13 Jun 2020, In: Concurrency Computation Practice and Experience. 34, 8, e5855.
  • 2018-2020 Efficacy of a computer-based cognitive training program to enhance planning skills in 5 to 7-year-old normally-developing children. Ríos Cruz, S. G., Olivares Pérez, T., Hernández Expósito, S., Bolívar Barón, H. D., Gillon Dowens, M. & Betancort Montesinos, M., 2 Jan 2020, In: Applied Neuropsychology: Child. 9, 1, p. 21-30 10 p.
  • 2017-2019   Lin Y., Wei D., & Gillon Dowens M.  Learning a new language at older ages: neuro-cognitive and psychological wellbeing effects from an ERP study. Presented at 21st Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCoP), 25th -28th of September, 2019, Tenerife, Spain
  • 2017-2019 Processing of task-irrelevant words of different frequency values: A visual mismatch negativity study Wei, D. & Gillon Dowens, M., 20 Mar 2019, In: NeuroReport. 30, 5, p. 383-388 6 p.
  • 2016-2018  Early lexical processing of Chinese words indexed by Visual Mismatch Negativity effects Wei, D., Gillon Dowens, M. & Guo, T., 1 Dec 2018, In: Scientific Reports. 8, 1, 1289.