Dr. Jing Yang was invited to give a poster presentation on the 31st Annual Second Language Research Forum (http://ml.hss.cmu.edu/slrf2012/) atCarnegieMellonUniversityon October 21. In her study, she examined the distinct roles of working memory, processing speed, phonological awareness as well as IQ factors in the first and second language development of Chinese-English bilingual children and adults. Her results show that phonological awareness is a key to English learning, even for Chinese speakers, whose first language has no grapheme-to-phoneme translation rules. Phonological working memory is vital for Chinese learning in both groups. Processing speed, measured in a rapid digit naming task, is a language-universal predictor.

Dr. Yang visited the Brain, Language and Computation Lab at thePennsylvaniaStateUniversity(http://cogsci.psu.edu/). During her short stay, she discussed research plans and possible collaborations with Prof. Ping Li, the director of BLC lab and the other lab members.