The NUS Department of Psychology is proud to announce that Dr. Cynthia Siew has been conferred the FASS 2021/22 Award for Promising Researcher (AER).

The faculty-level AER is presented to researchers within five years of obtaining their PhD. The successful researcher has produced research that shows potential impact and promise. This research work should have been initiated, or carried out independently, by the nominee.

As a psycholinguist and cognitive scientist who uses network analysis to study cognitive structures such as the mental lexicon and semantic memory, Dr. Siew is especially interested in investigating how people are able to ‘find’ the words they need in any given instant from our vast and complex mental libraries. She commented,

I want to bring Singapore to the international stage of psycholinguistic research. Current research in many areas of psychology are, unfortunately, too Western-centric, and tend to overlook the diversity that exists in the world’s languages and cultures. I believe that the multilingualism of Singaporean society offers an important opportunity to ask how the semantic structure of the mental lexicon is influenced by the specific cultural and historical contexts that it is embedded in.”

The Department warmly congratulates Dr. Siew on her recognition as a Promising Researcher by the Faculty!

Read more: https://fass.nus.edu.sg/cynthia-siew/