Graduate Students

Emily Akers is a PhD student in the SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral program in Language and Communicative Disorders. She received her BA in psychology from SDSU and has spent the last two years working as a lab manager for the NeuroCognition lab using EEG/ERPs to study the processing of sign language in ASL learners and deaf adults.

Sadie Camilliere is a PhD student in the UCSD/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders. She received a B.A. in Psychology and Linguistics from Swarthmore College, where she worked in the Psycholinguistics and EEG labs on projects investigating implicit and explicit processing of singular “they”.

Marisa Fried is in her second year of the Speech-Language Pathology MA program. She is passionate about cognitive linguistics, bilingualism, and indigenous languages. She has participated in research on verb agreement in K’iche (Mayan) at the University of Maryland and the relationship between dementia and hearing loss with Dr. Coco at SDSU. She hopes to work with the adult population as a speech pathologist, and aspires to be an outdoor educator on the side.

Ayden Kpormegbey is a PhD student in the SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders. She received her BA in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences from SDSU. Her research focuses on language acquisition and reading using eye tracking and EEG/ERPs.

Sofia Ortega is a PhD student in the UCSD/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders. She received her BA in Psychology with an emphasis in Neuroscience from SDSU in 2023. Her research focuses on American Sign Language (ASL) fingerspelling and English reading using event-related potentials (ERPs).

Martina Riva is a PhD student in the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) doctoral program in Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience. She graduated in Neuroscience and Neuropsychological rehabilitation at the University of Bologna. Her research focuses on language acquisition in both unimodal and bimodal bilingual children. She is spending a research scholar visiting period at SDSU, working on an ERP project on adult ASL signers.