About

Dr. Laurie Lawyer is a psycholinguist and Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UC Davis, who joined the department in 2024. Her research primarily addresses how linguistic input influences lexical perception and explores the relationship between this perception and models of lexical access and storage. Guided by theoretical work in phonology and morphology, she investigates structures that challenge current understanding of word storage and processing. As the director of the L+PLUS Lab, Dr. Lawyer employs various methodologies, including behavioral tasks, eye-tracking, and EEG, to study language processing across the lifespan and in diverse linguistic populations. Her research encompasses how school-aged children process different accents and grammatical structures, how adult first- and second-language users process complex morphological and syntactic forms in real time, and the effects of aging on the linguistic system. Her work extends beyond English to include research on French, Kinyarwanda, Mandarin, British Sign Language, and American Sign Language. She teaches courses in psycholinguistics, phonology, morphology, and language acquisition.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Linguistics
• Computer Science
• Developmental psychology
• Neuroscience
• Communication
• Audiology
• Biology

Selected publications

• Accent the positive: An investigation into five-year-olds’ implicit attitudes towards different regional accents

  Journal of Child Language · 2025-04-14 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Regional accent biases in 27 Essex five-year-olds are investigated. This study is the first to analyse implicit language attitudes by measuring children's neural activity (event-related potentials) while they take part in an Implicit Association Test. Both measures find a preference towards the prestigious accent, Standard Southern British English (SSBE), which is associated with cleverness (CLEVER). A late positive potential in the brain data for the association of the familiar, low-prestige Essex accent with CLEVER suggests the children also have a positive association with their home accent. The association between the less familiar, low-prestige Yorkshire accent and either CLEVER or NOT-CLEVER depends on the measure. Differences in the results are found relating to the children's accent exposure; those with a more heterogenous group of caretakers show more positive bias towards all three accents overall. Consequences for modelling the development of language attitudes are discussed.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Matter of Memory? Age‐Invariant Relative Clause Disambiguation and Memory Interference in Older Adults

  Topics in Cognitive Science · 2024-10-16 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Past research suggests that Working Memory plays a role in determining relative clause attachment bias. Disambiguation preferences may further depend on Processing Speed and explicit memory demands in linguistic tasks. Given that Working Memory and Processing Speed decline with age, older adults offer a way of investigating the factors underlying disambiguation preferences. Additionally, older adults might be subject to more severe similarity-based memory interference given their larger vocabularies and slower lexical access. Nevertheless, memory interference and sentence disambiguation have not been combined in studies on older adults before. We used a self-paced reading paradigm under memory load interference conditions. Older (n = 30) and Younger (n = 35) readers took part in the study online; reading times were recorded and measures of comprehension accuracy and load recall were collected. This setup allowed for the implicit measurement of attachment biases and memory interference effects interactively. Results show that similarity-based interference affected both age groups equally, but was more pronounced in NP2-biased structures, which took participants generally longer to read. Attachment preferences did not differ by group and were unaffected by Working Memory span. However, accuracy on recall prompts was predicted by Working Memory span in both groups. Findings of greater interference in syntactically dispreferred structures support unified processing models where parsing constraints naturally interact. The lack of age differences on our measures further aligns with research finding age-invariant implicit language processing.

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• Bilinguals’ sensitivity to specificity and genericity: evidence from implicit and explicit knowledge

  Bilingualism Language and Cognition · 2024-12-02 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract The present paper investigates whether school-aged French-English bilingual children’s implicit and explicit knowledge of article use is affected by cross-linguistic influence (CLI) during online and offline sentence comprehension. The studies focus on the encoding of plural and mass nouns in specific and generic contexts. We also explore whether individual measures of oral proficiency, language exposure and age play a role in the children’s performance. Forty-three 8-to-10-year-old French-English bilingual children took part in a Self-Paced Reading task, a Grammaticality Judgement task and a Cloze test in their two languages. Overall, CLI was observed across tasks in English and French. These findings suggest that CLI can be bi-directional and tap into school-aged bilinguals’ implicit and explicit representations during sentence comprehension and production. The data also makes a new contribution to our understanding of the relative amount of language exposure, oral proficiency and age on CLI.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Meaning or morphology: Individual differences in the categorization of Kinyarwanda nouns

  Glossa Psycholinguistics · 2024-09-05 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Unlike the gender-based systems of noun categorization in many European languages, numerous semantic categories contribute to Bantu noun class systems. Kinyarwanda, the focus of our study, has a rich inventory of noun class prefixes, but it is unknown to what degree the semantic and morphological systems underlying these noun classes influence how speakers mentally categorize nominals in their language. To investigate this, speakers of Kinyarwanda (n = 46) were recruited to take part in an online triadic comparison experiment. Across 144 trials, participants were asked to identify the item most different from a written list of three nouns. These lists were constructed based on morphological similarity (from noun classes 3, 5, 7, or 9), semantic overlap (from the domains of ‘mammals’ and ‘tools’), or both. Results show an overall preference for semantic grouping in the triads, although the strength of these preferences differed across individuals. This variation turned out to be systematic and predictable: speakers of Kinyarwanda who spoke Kiswahili as an additional language generally preferred categorizing on the basis of noun class, while those who did not speak Kiswahili as an additional language were more likely to base their decisions on the shared semantic domains of the nouns. These data suggest that noun categorization choices in Kinyarwanda can be influenced by knowledge of other linguistic systems, highlighting the impact that learning additional languages may have on first-language lexical knowledge.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• In the prime of life: ERP evidence for syntactic comprehension priming in older adults

  Journal of Language and Aging Research · 2023-08-03 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Background: Recent studies suggest older adults’ implicit learning of syntactic patterns remains largely intact. Syntactic priming has proven to be a sensitive tool to examine this implicit sensitivity. However, most priming studies with older adults have focused on production, and none have included an electrophysiological component. This study explores the neural correlates of syntactic priming in older adults’ comprehension. Method: We used a self-paced reading and event-related potential paradigm with groups of older and younger adults. Reduced Relative targets were primed, unprimed, or lexically boosted, while reading times and EEG recordings were obtained. Pre-tests of Working Memory and Processing Speed were also recorded. Results: Older adults showed intact priming and lexical boost on reading times, while lexical facilitation was dependent on syntactic overlap in the older but not the younger group. Syntactic priming was evident on N400 and P600 modulations on verbs and nouns in Reduced Relatives, and generally did not differ by age group. This suggests older and younger adults are equally susceptible to syntactic facilitation, and makes the case for more non-declarative, electrophysiological measurements of older adults’ sentence processing ability in future studies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Testing the Interpretability Hypothesis: Evidence from acceptability judgments of relative clauses by Persian and French learners of L2 English

  Second language Research · 2023-04-22 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Many studies have explored the second language (L2) acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and whether L2 speakers transfer a resumptive strategy from first language (L1) to L2. While evidence seems to suggest that there are significant L1–L2 differences in the processing of RCs, relatively little is known about the source of non-target-like L2 behaviour. The present study investigates the grammatical acceptability of different RC types in L2 English and whether reliance on a resumptive strategy is a syntactic or processing issue. The participants included 71 L1-Persian L2-English, 52 L1-French L2-English, and 44 native English speakers, who completed a proficiency c-test, a grammaticality judgment task, and a reading span working memory (WM) task. Unlike French, which is similar to English in the syntactic derivation of RCs, Persian is a structurally wh-in-situ language that syntactically allows resumption in direct object and object-of-preposition RCs. The results showed that unlike L1-French speakers, L1-Persian speakers were more likely to accept resumptive pronouns in L2-English RCs; however, both L1 and L2 groups overwhelmingly preferred a gap over a resumptive strategy. The results suggest that given sufficiently high proficiency and long immersion experience, L2 speakers can match native speakers in terms of RC syntactic representations, suggesting that the issue faced by learners is a processing issue rather a representational one as suggested by the Interpretability Hypothesis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Exploring the Effects of Aging on Language Abilities in Deaf Signers

  2022-12-02 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Our understanding of the effects of aging on language has overwhelmingly been predicated on studies of spoken languages, and few studies have examined the impact of aging on deaf users of naturally occurring signed languages. Studies of language abilities in deaf signers present unique opportunities to broaden our understanding of the impact of chronological aging on human language processing, as well as explore modality and language-specific factors that may uniquely affect sign language use in the face of aging.

  PublisherDOI

• Electrophysiological Examination of Ambient Speech Processing in Children With Cochlear Implants

  Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research · 2022-08-29 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Purpose: This research examined the expression of cortical auditory evoked potentials in a cohort of children who received cochlear implants (CIs) for treatment of congenital deafness ( n = 28) and typically hearing controls ( n = 28). Method: We make use of a novel electroencephalography paradigm that permits the assessment of auditory responses to ambiently presented speech and evaluates the contributions of concurrent visual stimulation on this activity. Results: Our findings show group differences in the expression of auditory sensory and perceptual event-related potential components occurring in 80- to 200-ms and 200- to 300-ms time windows, with reductions in amplitude and a greater latency difference for CI-using children. Relative to typically hearing children, current source density analysis showed muted responses to concurrent visual stimulation in CI-using children, suggesting less cortical specialization and/or reduced responsiveness to auditory information that limits the detection of the interaction between sensory systems. Conclusion: These findings indicate that even in the face of early interventions, CI-using children may exhibit disruptions in the development of auditory and multisensory processing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Syntactic comprehension priming and lexical boost effects in older adults

  Language Cognition and Neuroscience · 2022 · 7 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Cognitive psychology
  • Linguistics

  The extent to which syntactic priming in comprehension is affected by ageing has not yet been extensively explored. It is further unclear whether syntactic comprehension priming persists across fillers in older adults. This study used a self-paced reading task and controlled for syntactic and lexical overlap, to (1) discover whether syntactic comprehension priming exists in older adults, across fillers, (2) to uncover potential differences between older and younger adults on priming measures, and (3) identify whether Working Memory or Processing Speed affect priming in older adults. Both older (n=30,Mage=68.6,SD=3.68) and Younger adults (n=30,Mage=21.6,SD=2.44) showed effects of syntactic priming and lexical boost. This suggests syntactic processing does not decline with age, and that abstract priming and the lexical boost are not dependent on residual activation or explicit retention in memory.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sentence comprehension in ageing and Alzheimer's disease

  Language and Linguistics Compass · 2021 · 31 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Cognitive psychology
  • Psychology

  Abstract The ability to correctly interpret complex syntax and long sentences is gradually impaired as people age. Typical ageing is characterised by working memory deficits, which are thought to play an important role in determining whether syntax can be comprehended correctly, and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) are thought to exacerbate these limitations. Furthermore, declines in processing speed appear to cause increasing difficulty in the proper allocation of cognitive resources necessary for sentence processing. Typically ageing adults may compensate for these deficits successfully when interpreting sentences using semantics or intact cognitive functions, but AD patients may exhibit deficits too severe for this to occur. The causes of syntax comprehension deficits in Alzheimer's are still contested, and may consist of language‐specific impairments or deficits in general cognition impacting linguistic behaviour. In this review, we aim to give an overview of the main markers of cognitive ageing and AD in the domain of sentence comprehension, as well as discuss potential underlying factors that may affect sentence comprehension in older speakers and Alzheimer's patients.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David P. Corina

  University of California, Davis

  13 shared

• Todd LaMarr

  University of California, Davis

  7 shared

• Kristina C. Backer

  University of California, Merced

  6 shared

• Lee M. Miller

  Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

  5 shared

• Willem S. van Boxtel

  Louisiana State University

  5 shared

• Sharon Coffey‐Corina

  University of California, Davis

  5 shared

• Elizabeth Pierotti

  University of California, Davis

  4 shared

• Brett Bormann

  University of California, Davis

  4 shared

Awards & honors

• Nancy Webb Scholarship
• Steven Lapointe Award
• Tippy Schwabe Grant