Dr. Qi Cheng (Primary Investigator) and collaborator Dr. Christina Zhao (Co-Investigator) received a National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) Early Career Research(ECR) Award (R21, $375,000 total direct) to support a three-year project. The study, ‘Examining MEG visual mismatch responses to ASL signs by deaf and hearing signers’, will explore the increased language processing efforts at the phonological and lexical levels by deaf signers who learned ASL after childhood. The findings will help us understand critical period effects of speech perceptual learning and its relationship with later language development.
Dr. Cheng also received a subaward as the Co-Investigator of an R01 award ($1,306,122 direct cost) from National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) granted to PI Dr. Chuchu Li (UCSD Psychiatry). This five-year study will examine cognitive mechanisms underlying bilingual language processing and learning and is titled ‘Language Control across Comprehension and Production in Unimodal and Bimodal Bilinguals’.
See more about Dr. Cheng’s research on the Neuroplasticity & Language Laboratory website https://sites.uw.edu/nllab/news/