Alexis Black

Dr. Black received her doctorate in Linguistics and Cognitive Systems from UBC in 2018. Her dissertation examined the underlying mechanisms of statistical learning. Her graduate research training involved extensive experience with adult and child perception and behavioural choice experimentation, infant looking time methods, fNIRS and EEG, special populations (neonates) and computational methods, such as meta-analysis. After her doctorate, she received an NIH F32 Postdoctoral Fellowship award to work with Dr. Richard Aslin at Yale University and Haskins Laboratories to explore the nature of word-like representations in infants, children, and adults using machine learning classifiers on EEG and fNIRS data. Together, they demonstrated that SVM analysis of EEG signals can successfully predict what word an individual subject is listening to.

In January 2020, she was hired as Assistant Professor by the School of Audiology and Speech Sciences. Since beginning at UBC, Dr. Black has received three tri-council grants (NSERC DG, SSHRC IDG, SSHRC DG) as PI and is Co-PI, collaborator and consultant on multiple others. She leads the Language and Development Lab, which has been working to adapt the SVM-decoding pipelines to observe changes in infant and adult representations during word learning tasks. The lab aims to develop a tool that can identify the word-hood status in the developing brain, and to examine how word representations form under different learning conditions (e.g., given implicit statistical sound distributions versus active labelling contexts), or across different populations (typically developing versus language-delayed).