Cynthia S. Q. Siew

Psycholinguist who studies language networks.

Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore

(but once a Jayhawk, always a Jayhawk.)

I’m currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore, and Principal Investigator of the Language and Computation Lab. After graduating from the Cognitive and Brain Sciences PhD Program at the University of Kansas, USA, in 2017, I went across the pond and was a post doctoral fellow at the University of Warwick, UK, from 2017 to 2019.

I’m a psycholinguist and cognitive scientist who uses network analysis to study cognitive structures, such as the mental lexicon and semantic memory. My research uses a combination of experimental methods from cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics, computational modeling and mathematical methods from network science, and large-scale analysis of databases and linguistic corpora to address the following questions:

Theme 1: How does the structure of the lexicon influence processing?

• How does the similarity structure of the mental lexicon (the part of long-term memory that stores phonological and orthographic representations) influence spoken and visual word recognition?
• How does the structure of the semantic network affect semantic processing?

Theme 2: How does the structure of the lexicon change over time?

• How does the structure of phonological and semantic language networks affect word learning and language acquisition among monolinguals, bilinguals, and second language learners?
• How can we quantify and study structural changes of the lexicon over the lifespan?

Hope you have fun checking out my research and teaching. I also blog (very) irregularly about R and other random things - check out the blog page below:

• 2022/03/25 Posts