Curriculum Vitae ✨

⭐ Beier, E. J., Chantavarin, S., & Ferreira, F. (2023). Do people become more disfluent with age? Evidence from a longitudinal corpus study of disfluencies. Psychology and Aging, 38(3), 203-218. https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000741

Do people speak less fluently as they age? We addressed this question by analyzing 325 interviews of 91 famous people over their lives, gathered from YouTube and other social media. The key finding is that age itself is not a strong predictor of disfluencies (e.g., uh/uhm, repeats, repairs). Age leads to changes in other speech characteristics in some individuals (i.e., speech rate and indicators of lexical and syntactic complexity), and those changes predict the rate of speech disfluencies over the lifespan.

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⭐ Dempsey, J., Tsiola, A., Chantavarin, S., Ferreira, F., & Christianson, K. (2023). Nonce word evidence for the misinterpretation of implausible events. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 35(5), 526-544. 

https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2023.2216913

We used self-paced reading, question answering, and sentence completions to test the hypothesis that implausible events sometimes elicit non-literal, plausible event representations. We compared plausible and implausible event structures, both active and passive, with nonce-word versions of those same events to serve as a baseline for real-world heuristic knowledge and working memory costs (e.g., "The vek/man/dog <bit/was bitten by> the fel/dog/man"). In the sentence completion study, we used probes designed to elicit agenthood interpretations (e.g., "After being bitten, ..."). We found that although implausible sentences did not cause real-time processing difficulty compared to plausible sentences, implausible structures led to higher misinterpretation rates in the offline measures. In the nonce conditions, accuracy was lower and reading times were longer compared to the plausible conditions, suggesting that participants had greater difficulty recalling nonce nouns. Overall, the data support a Good-Enough processing account of sentence comprehension. 

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⭐ Chantavarin, S., Morgan, E., & Ferreira, F. (2022). Robust processing advantage for binomial phrases with variant conjunctions. Cognitive Science, 46(9), e13187. 

https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13187

When you hear "Pass me the salt as well as the pepper", does your brain process it like a novel phrase, or like the familiar binomial phrase "salt and pepper"?  Cloze responses (Exp 1) showed that variant binomials like “salt and also the pepper” and “salt as well as the pepper” remain robustly predictable (>75% cloze scores), despite the variant function words. Two eye tracking studies (Exp 2) and a self-paced reading study (Exp 3) found faster reading times on the canonical phrase-final noun (“pepper”) in the variant binomials, compared to a novel unpredictable noun matched on word length (“paprika”). Overall, our findings add to the growing body of evidence that the brain is remarkably flexible in recognizing and efficiently processing variant forms of highly conventional multi-word expressions.

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⭐ Beier, E. J., Chantavarin, S., Rehrig, G., Ferreira, F., & Miller, L. M. (2021). Cortical tracking of speech: Toward collaboration between the fields of signal and sentence processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 33(4), 574-593. 

https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn_a_01676

This opinion paper argues that the study of auditory language processing can benefit from greater collaboration between the fields of sentence processing (in psycholinguistics) and auditory signal processing (in perceptual neurophysiology). We outline the methodological constraints from each field and provide suggestions on how they may be reconciled to advance our understanding of the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying real-time language comprehension.

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⭐ Ferreira, F., & Chantavarin, S. (2018). Integration and prediction in language processing: A synthesis of old and new. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(6), 443-448. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418794491

This review paper provides a bird's eye view of the longstanding debate in psycholinguistics regarding the relative contributions of bottom-up  integration vs. top-down prediction during language processing. We propose a unifying framework that describes the role of integration and prediction as complementary mechanisms supporting language comprehension. 

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⭐ Woods, D., & Chantavarin, S. (2017). Serial neuropsychological assessment of an adolescent girl after suffering a sudden out-of-hospital-cardiac-arrest following recreational inhalant use. Applied Neuropsychology: Child, 6(4), 378-387. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622965.2016.1185372

This paper reports the neuropsychological outcomes of a young girl who suffered from a heart attack due to recreational inhalant use. Provides details of her neurocognitive assessment at three different time points across 12 months. Demonstrates a rare case study in which a patient survived out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and made remarkable neuropsychological recovery despite the severe impact of substance use on the brain.