Cynthia Siew

Education

• Ph.D. (KU),
• M.A. (KU),
• B.Soc.Sci. (Hons.) (NUS)

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?

Research Interests:

• Lexical retrieval
• Development of the mental lexicon
• Network analysis

Recent/Representative Publications:

• Siew, C. S. Q., & Vitevitch, M. S. (2019). The phonographic language network: Using network science to investigate the phonological and orthographic similarity structure of language. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(3), 475–500. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000575

• Siew, C. S. Q. (2019). spreadr: A R package to simulate spreading activation in a network. Behavior Research Methods, 51(2), 910–929. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1186-5

• Siew, C. S. Q., & Vitevitch, M.S. (2016). Spoken word recognition and serial recall of words from components in the phonological network. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(3), 394-410. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000139