Biography:
My name is Abby Cosgrove and I am a junior in the Schreyer Honors College pursuing a double major in Psychology and Spanish. I have been working as a research assistant in the BiLD Lab. I am extremely interested in how bilingualism affects the development of people and the BiLD lab is a great place for me to grow, learn, and further pursue my passions for psychology and language.
This summer, I will be traveling to Granada, Spain to evaluate the effects of foreign accented speaker identity on Spanish-English bilingual listeners. This data was collected using an EEG measuring Event Related Potentials (ERPs). ERPs help capture neural activity related to cognitive and sensory processes, measuring an electro-physical response to a stimulus. In this study the stimulus is language comprehension. In my study, I add a nonlinguistic cue to speaker identity and measure the effects. The addition of a face cue to speaker identity may affect the pattern of results of a foreign accent on the neural correlates of grammatical and semantic processing.
I am so appreciative of the opportunity PIRE has provided me with and I cannot wait to learn more academically, culturally, and personally with my upcoming trip abroad.