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| Kiley Hill, B.A. Master's Student , Department of Psychology, San Diego State University |
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| Background & Research Interest | ||
| I grew up in a small town in southwest Missouri. I later attended Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. There my undergraduate study entailed psychology with a minor in biology and global studies. During my undergraduate study I took an internship at a children’s psychiatric hospital, where I continued to work for two years. After graduation I worked as a research assistant at the University of Florida in Dr. Crosson’s neuropsychology lab where I ran subjects in an fMRI study, coded data for aphasiac patient studies, and observed experimental clinical treatments with aphasiac patients at the McKnight Brain Institute, Brain Research & Rehabilitation Center, and the VA Hospital. Currently, I am a 2nd year master’s student at SDSU in Dr. Axel Müller’s Brain Development and Imaging Lab. My focus is on normal language development, primarily looking at language acquisition through lexical acquisition of novel words (how word information is represented according its referential information). Children by certain ages are just as capable, if not more, to perform certain language tasks as adults, despite the fact that their brain is still developing. As a result, I expect children to utilize different neuronal networks in lexical acquisition as compared to adults, which I will examine with fMRI as well as behavioral testing measures. | ||