you wanna piece of this?


name: Ellen Lau
age: 26
sister: Rachel
bf: Thomaz Alvares
city: DC
neighborhood: Mount Pleasant
job: 4th year grad student at U. Maryland Linguistics
contact: ellenlau [at] umd [dot] edu


modern ln


This is my website, ALWAYS a work in progress. I guess it will gradually become less silly and more professional as I get older and closer to applying for jobs...

In the meantime, if you miss silly, you can always revisit the past at my undergraduate website.

Like many, I'm interested in how the brain works. There are a lot of ways you can go from there, and mine is language. A couple of the Very Big problems I am interested in within language processing are a) how do we combine more than one piece of information; and b) how is the interaction between expectation and perception played out in 'real-time'. The second one is what I am concentrating on lately.

courses

LING499A - Psycholinguistics of Speech (co-taught with Phil Monahan)

publications

Wagers, M.W., Lau, E.F., & Phillips, C. (submitted). Agreement attraction in comprehension: representations and processes.
Lau, E.F., Rozanova, K., & Phillips, C. (2007). Syntactic prediction and lexical frequency effects in Sentence Processing. University of Maryland Working Papers. pdf
Kazanina, N., Lau, E.F., Lieberman, M., Phillips, C., & Yoshida, M. (2007). Effect of syntactic constraints on long-distance dependency formation in backwards anaphora processing. Journal of Memory and Language.
Lau, E. F., Stroud, C., Plesch, S., & Phillips, C. (2006). The role of prediction in rapid syntactic analysis. Brain & Language. pdf
Resnik, P., Elkiss, A., Lau, E., & Taylor, H. (2005). The Web in Theoretical Linguistics Research: Two Case Studies Using the Linguist's Search Engine. Proceedings of the 31st Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 2005. pdf
Lau, E. F. & Ferreira, F. (2005). Lingering effects of disfluent material on the comprehension of garden path sentences. Language and Cognitive Processes. pdf
Phillips, C. & Lau, E. F. (2004). Foundational Issues (review article for R. Jackendoff’s Foundations of Language). Journal of Linguistics, 40, 571-591. pdf
Ferreira, F., Lau, E. F., & Bailey, K. G. D. (2004). Disfluencies, Language Comprehension, and Tree Adjoining Grammars. Cognitive Science, 28(5), 721-749.pdf

drafts

895 preliminary draft ~ Time-course and localization of syntactic and semantic anomaly in sentence processing: a within-subjects fMRI/MEG design. draft .. MEG figures .. fMRI figures .. fMRI meta-analysis tables .. bibliography ..

selected presentations

Lau, E.F., Wagers, M.W., & Phillips, C. (2007). How (not) to get confused in comprehension: the case of agreement attraction, Talk given at the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Conference, 13, Turku, Finland.
Lau, E.F., Yeung, H.H., Hashimoto, R., Braun, A., & Phillips, C. (2006) Time-course and localization of syntactic and semantic anomaly responses in sentence processing: a within-subjects fMRI/MEG design. Poster presented at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting.
Wagers, M. & Lau, E.F. (2006). Non-intervening attraction and agreement in comprehension. Poster presented at the 12th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. pdf
Lau, E.F., Rozanova, K., & Phillips, C. (2006). Differential effects of lexical surface frequency on reading times in syntactic context. Poster presented at the 19th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York, NY. pdf


the requisite CV


course presentations & papers (for general perusal and slide-copying)

Lookahead in Phonological Processing - review of the extent of phonological lookahead available in production, taking off from Keating & Shattuck-Hufnagel (2002)
Brief review of the Morton-Massaro Law - review taking off from ideas in Movellan & McClelland (2001)
Lau & Monahan, for Bill Idsardi's class - examination of the analysis-by-synthesis view of speech perception
awfulwaffle - adventures in semantic satiation and lexical access
nRouse - a summary of some of Dave Huber's work
Investigating the CWH - wherein I review the N400 literature on priming and consider its import for a 'boring' N400 interpretation
thinking about timing
visual summary of ELAN literature. (circa winter 04)


tools
Note: these are documents and slides that I've made largely to organize my own thoughts about software/methodologies/analysis. I've put them here b/c they might be helpful to others as well, but I am not a math expert, so they likely have errors. If you notice anything egregious, please drop me a line.

R intro for psycholinguists. I am still pretty naive at R, but it is great for large RT datasets for the stage where you just want to look at your data in a million different ways. Here I've just got the basics to get started.
getting fMRI. a ridiculously silly, simple fMRI tutorial powerpoint I made to teach myself.

(beta version: filtering intro)
filtering for electrophysiological data . Based on the treatment in Steven Luck's fantastic (2005) book.
filtering in matlab tutorial 1 - basic fft
filtering in matlab tutorial 2 - basic filtering

(beta version: artifact rejection)
artifact rejection for electrophysiological data. Based on Luck 2005.
choosing an artifact rejection algorithm. A walk-through.
matlab script for MEG160 data eyeblink artifact rejection--UNFINISHED

CNL Guide to using FieldTrip for MEG data - work in progress
CNL Guide to using NUTMEG for MEG-MRI data - work in progress
readingMEGfile.m - Huan Luo's script for reading in epoch data
epReadFT.m
yoko2timelock.m


good kids

the haircut