Dr. Bernard Jap

Biography

My interest lies in language processing in both typical and clinical populations, with a focus on sentence comprehension and production, reading comprehension, and language assessment. One notable achievement is my collaboration with a team at the University of Groningen to design and publish the first reading assessment and dyslexia test battery for Indonesian, a language spoken by over 250 million people.

Currently, my research utilizes electrophysiology, particularly event-related potentials (ERPs), to uncover fundamental cognitive processes underlying language comprehension. Recently, in collaboration with researchers from PolyU HK, we explore linguistic universals by investigating neural correlates of thematic role assignment (one of our studies has been covered by SCMP).

As an early-stage researcher, I advocate for open science by ensuring my studies are replicable and methodologically robust, with data available in open-access repositories. I also support registered reports in open-access journals, where experimental protocols receive feedback before studies are conducted (see example 1, example 2).

Teaching Areas & Research Interests

• Psycholinguistics

• Neurolinguistics

• Electroencephalography (EEG)/ Event-related potentials (ERP)

• Sentence processing

• Reading and dyslexia

• Aphasiology and clinical linguistics