Dr. Ioulia Kovelman
Principal Investigator
Dr. Kovelman studies the Bilingual Brain and how children learn to speak and to read in more than one language. Dr. Kovelman’s current projects focus on cross-linguistic patterns in bilingual development, such as Spanish-English and Chinese-English speaking children, using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) brain imaging. Our research extends to include individuals who speak multiple dialects of the same language, as well as children with reading and language learning impairments such as dyslexia, language impairments, and hearing deficits.
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Research Staff
Dr. Xiaosu (Frank) Hu
Research Investigator
Frank is a research investigator at the Center for Human Growth and Development. He received his Ph.D. at Pusan National University (Korea) in Cogno-Mechatronics Engineering. His research interests include biomedical signal processing, fNIRS/EEG based brain signal detection and brain engineering (BCI). His applied work uses fNIRS to study human daily behavior accompanied brain responses, including pain evoked human brain response, different mental states while people are driving, and the pediatric brain responses during language acquisition.
He currently works for Language & Literacy Lab and Headache & Orofacial Pain Effort Lab as a Research Investigator.
Valeria Caruso
Research Investigator
Valeria is a research investigator at the Center for Human Growth and Development. She received her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at SISSA (Trieste, Italy) working on auditory perceptual learning. She has done research at Duke University concerning 1) how the primate brain encodes spatial visual and auditory cues that help localize objects and guide movements, and 2) what encoding mechanisms allow processing multiple cues simultaneously and 3) whether similar information encoding mechanisms support language perception in humans (ongoing research). She is also interested in looking at language processing and acquisition from a developmental perspective.
Isabel Hernandez
Lab Manager
She received her bachelor’s degree from Universidad de las Americas-Puebla UDLAP (Puebla, México). She is interested in understanding cognitive, language processing, and brain development, especially in bilingual kids. As a lab manager, she coordinates projects, assists with IRB submissions, conducts, and trains behavioral assessments as well as data entry, data collection, and data analysis. She plans and coordinates participant recruitment, determines their qualifications by performing phone interviews with the candidates, maintains accurate records of interviews, and safeguards the confidentiality of the participants. In addition, she is very experienced in building strong, long-term, and mutually beneficial relationships between the participants and the lab. Bilingual Spanish-English.
Graduate Students
Nia Nickerson
Nia studies how diversity in language experiences influence children’s academic, socio-cultural, and brain development. To answer her research questions, Nia studies children who speak multiple languages, such as Spanish-English bilinguals, as well as children who speak multiple dialects of a language, such as speakers of Standard and African-American dialects of Americal English. In her research, Nia uses experimental measures of child language, literacy, brain (fNIRS), and socio-cultural developments.
Kehui Zhang
Kehui Zhang is a graduate student in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology. She is interested in bilingual language and reading development. In particular, she is interested in how different languages are organized in the bilingual brain, and how social context, language environment impact these neural organizations. Her current project in Language & Literacy Lab studies how do Chinese – English bilingual children process the two languages from a cognitive neural perspective. In addition, Kehui is also interested in using quantitative methods in evaluating the quality of early childhood programs and interventions.
Chi-Lin Yu
Chi-Lin is a Ph.D. student in the Developmental Area in Psychology. He focuses on social cognition in children and adults via behavioral experiments, neuroimaging techniques, and computational modeling. Specific topics include the underlying mechanism of the Theory of Mind (ToM), the development of ToM, and how ToM becomes dysfunctional clinical populations. The ongoing projects are (1) designing new, advanced ToM measures, (2) meta-analyzing the literature to capture specificity and commonality of ToM, (3) examining ToM trajectory in deaf children, and (4) implementing naturalistic neuroimaging designs to investigate social cognitive processing.
UM: https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/people/graduate-students/chi-lin-yu.html
Personal Website: https://psychilin.github.io/
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com.tw/citations?user=56kSGMMAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra
CV: https://github.com/PsyChiLin/CV/blob/master/CV.pdf
Rachel Eggleston
Rachel Eggleston is a graduate student in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology. Before joining the Language and Literacy Lab, Rachel taught high school science and Special Education in Providence, RI, and Washington, DC. Teaching high school students developed her interest in the science of reading disabilities and taught her the importance of reading for academic and future success. Rachel’s current project focuses on the neurobiology of dyslexia. Additional research interests include language and reading development in bilingual youth with and without reading impairments. Rachel earned a B.A. in Neuroscience from Dartmouth College and an M.A. in Urban Education Policy from Brown University.
Alumni
Rebecca Marks
Rebecca is a graduate student in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology. She graduated with Latin honors from Washington University in St. Louis in 2013, and spent a year teaching middle school math with Teach For America. Her research focuses broadly on academic outcomes among bilingual youth.
Xin Sun
Xin is a graduate student in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology at UM. She received her B.S. in Psychology from Beijing Normal University in 2016. Her research uses both behavioral and neuroimaging methods to study how bilingual children learn to read. Her dissertation focuses on the bilingual transfer of morphological and phonological awareness. She is also interested in how culturalized individuals think about learning.
Xin’s google scholar page
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Deh6LRUAAAAJ&hl=en
Dr. Neelima Wagley
Neelima received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at UM in 2019. She conducted research in bilingual language and reading development using multimodal neuroimaging methodologies as a PhD student at UM. For her dissertation, she investigated how bilingual social context, dual-language use, and language proficiency influence children’s emerging literacy skills and brain development. Currently, she is working with Dr James Booth as a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University to study language and brain development.
Akemi Tsutsumi
Akemi is a graduate student in Psychology. She received her B.S. in Biopsychology, Cognition and Neuroscience at UM in 2018, and she has been working as a lab manager for the fNIRS lab in the past two years. Her research interest includes using neuroimaging techniques.
Dr. Maria Arredondo
Maria received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan in 2017. As a doctoral student, she primarily studied attention and reading development in bilingual children, using developmental cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistic methodologies. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, working with Janet Werker to study infant bilingual language acquisition.
Dr. Silvia Bisconti
Silvia was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Language and Literacy Lab. She graduated from University of Padua (Italy) with a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Developmental and Educational Psychology. She received her Ph.D. in “Ultrastructural and Molecular Imaging” at University of L’Aquila (Italy). Her research interests include the study of the neural correlates underlying the language development in typical and atypical populations.
Alexa Ellis
Alexa is a graduate student in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology Program at UM. She received her B.A. in Psychology with a minor in French from UM in 2014, and her M.S. in Psychology from UM in 2015. Her research interests include understanding the different factors that impact mathematical achievement and the cognitive processes behind mathematical development.