Jing Yang

Associate Professor, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Curriculum Vitae: pdf

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Biography:

I am a Postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Ping Li on individual differences of working memory and language learning at the Laboratory of Brain, Language and Computation, Penn State University. Before coming to the institute, I worked with Dr. Li-Hai Tan as a doctoral student and studied Chinese reading disorders with fMRI at the State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Hong Kong. I got my Bachelor’s degree of Psychology at Beijing Normal University, China.

Research Interests:

My research focuses on language and memory. I use cognitive, behavioral, and neurological measures including functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the contribution of working memory in normal and abnormal language development. In addition, I also investigate cross-cultural differences in language and cognition, as well as how the brain handles multiple languages at the same time.

Recent Publications & Presentations:

Yang, J., Tan, L., & Li, P. (2011). Lexical representation of nouns and verbs in the late bilingual brain. Journal of Neurolinguistics, doi:10.1016/j.jneuroling.2011.07.002
Tan, L., Chen, L., Yip, V., Chan, A. H. D., Yang, J., Gao, J. H. & Siok, W. T. (2011). Activity levels in the left hemisphere caudate-fusiform circuit predict how well a second language will be learned. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108, 2540-2544.
Li, P., Yang, J., Shu, H., & Tan, L. (2011). Language-specific experience and AoA modulate neural activities in L1 and L2. Talk presented as part of a symposium, Universal and language-specific patterns in bilingual processing: The importance of a comparative approach (J. van Hell, Organizer).
Yang, J., Clark, P., Swick, K., Watkins, H., & Li P. (November, 2011). The role of working memory in explicit and implicit artificial grammar learning. Poster to be presented at the Neurobiology of Language Conference, Westin Annapolis, USA.
Yang, J., Tan, L. H., & Li P. (2010). Lexical representations of nouns and verbs in the late Bilinguals brain. Poster presented at the 17th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Montreal, Canada.