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Possidonia de Freitas Drumond Gontijo Tel: (310) 206-3655 E-mail: pgontijo@ucla.edu |
My primary research interests lie in three domains of knowledge, namely, language-culture, neuropsychology and consumer behavior. I believe these areas can benefit immensely from research tailored to investigate issues intrinsic to the others. I am particularly interested in the organization of the mental lexicon and how this impacts our language abilities and social behavior. By taking a behavioral and neural approach I have focused my research on the processing of different categories of linguistic stimuli, such as common nouns, proper names, brand names and invented words. Using the marketing framework, I currently explore the linguistics and graphical dimensions that make brand names successful in the market place, for example, in terms of brand awareness and consumer loyalty. In a broader context, my main goal is to build a model of how different types of names are processed by the mind/brain. As a result, I am also interested in reading disorders featuring category specific deficits as one of their symptoms, such as different types of dyslexia and of anomia (i.e. the failure to retrieve and/or recognize names after brain injury). I address these issues through the study of recognition, memory (short and long-term) and retrieval of real and invented letter strings. I've been using the hemispheric specialization paradigm to explore the issues above at the interface of psychology and neuroscience. A further interest of mine is the differences and similarities found in the syllabic structures of languages such as Portuguese, Spanish and English. I believe that accounting for these differences and similarities is of fundamental importance to our endeavor of constructing a universal model of language processing. I am also interested in the theoretical as well as practical issues surrounding literacy and language development.
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