Bilingualism and Autobiographical Memory
In research on bilingual autobiographical memory, I have conducted a series of studies on the language-specificity effect according to which bilinguals encode memoriesof the personal past in one or the other of their languages (depending on the language of the event) and preferentially recall memories in the language in which they were encoded. I am also interested in the role of emotion in bilingual memory, and in particular whether emotional memories are recalled more fully in one or the other language, how mechanisms of revisionism in memory might affect recall of emotion, and how emotion and stress are narrativized in life-stories. Currently, in collaboration with David Rubin at Duke University, I am looking at emotion language in memories of patients with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Language, Culture, and Cognitive Aging
Cognitive aging
is the discipline that explores how biological aging affects memory,
problem-solving, and language abilities. Cognitive anthropology,
a research tradition within linguistic anthropology, examines how
culture is encoded in human language, socially shared, and organized in
specific cultural domains. I have been interested in the
intersection of these approaches, and I have published research adapting
methods of cognitive anthropology to gerontology (e.g. freelisting,
metric scaling), and I have applied these methods to the substantive
issue of intracultural variation and dementia.
As regards the latter, Dr. Madelyn Iris (Northwestern University)
and I have been exploring ethnic differences in
diagnosis-seeking for Alzheimer’s
disease and cultural models
of Alzheimer’s disease and age-related memory impairment.
Language and Health Sciences
Health care and medical research involving individuals with limited English proficiency requires careful attention to conceptual, semantic, and lexical interpretation and translation. I have been particularly interested in the cultural and linguistic adaptation of tests of premorbid intelligence for use among older adults with limited English proficiency. These are essentially reading tests whose adaptation depends on the unique grapheme-to-phoneme mappings in each language. Recently, I have been working with Priscilla Ortiz, a graduate student in applied linguistics, to design and teach distance-education curriculum to train healthcare interpreters in the state of Pennsylvania.