Professional Preparation

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I run an active and engaging research lab at the Callier Center in Dallas where we use EEG and behavioral measures to study language development. I am currently investigating how poverty influences brain and language development in school aged children. 

Word Learning Reseach

Words allow children to create, differentiate, and reason about complex concepts. However, because even very young children seemingly acquire words with ease, the complexity and importance of this skill are often times underestimated and overlooked. Discovering how children learn words and what happens when this important and sometimes difficult process breaks down has been a driving force in my work. For example, in my graduate work with Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek,  we found that, quite different from noun learning, young children learn verbs more readily if they are given only one example of that action, repeated multiple times by the same actor, as opposed to seeing many different actors perform the same action (Maguire, et al. 2008). Thus, the strategy children use to learn a word changes based on the type of word to be learned. In my dissertation I addressed how word learning might differ based on children’s experiences. I found that by age 3, children who speak Spanish, Japanese, and English use different language-specific strategies to identify the meaning of an unknown verb based on their language’s typology (Maguire et al., 2010). This idea that children’s knowledge and experiences might influence how they approach word learning led to my interest in the vocabulary gap, and specifically how word learning might differ in at-risk, typically developing children from low SES homes. This is a driving question in my current research in which we have investigated how early differences in home enviornment might snowball into larger word learning differences in grade school (Maguire et al., 2018; Maguire & Schneider, 2019; Ralph, et al., 2020; Schneider et al., 2021;). 

Neural Oscillations Underlying Language and Cognition

In 2007, I was put in a unique position that allowed me to learn time frequency analysis to study neural oscillations, an analysis that is shifting the way we use EEG in cognitive neuroscience. I was asked by  to help establish the EEG Core of UT Southwestern’s “Gulf War Project” until a full-time EEG researcher was hired. The project was fascinating, with ten individual research cores ranging from animal models through EEG and structural and functional MRI all with the goal of identifying the neurological ramifications of Gulf War Syndrome. I stayed on after the core manager was hired, working closely with an EEG research team that included behavioral neurologist John Hart, neurophysicist Thomas Ferree, and statistician Jeffery Spence. We found that analyzing the EEG to study changes in neural oscillations of participants with Gulf War Syndrome provided new windows into our understanding of cognitive processes and where they break down that were undetected using traditional ERPs. By applying these analysis techniques and skills to my current research I have become one of a handful of researchers who uses time-locked neural oscillations to study cognitive and language development (Maguire & Abel, 2013). Using these techniques, I address questions about the subtle, likely subconscious processes that underlie word comprehension and learning in adults and children (Maguire, Brier & Ferree, 2010; Maguire et al, 2015; Middleton et al., 2018). In recent papers with my student, Julie Schneider, who is now an assistant professor at LSU, (Schneider, et al., 2016; 2018; Schneider & Maguire, 2018; 2019) we have focused on identifying the relationship between ERPs and neural oscillations, specifically focusing on the relationships between the N400 and theta and the P600 and beta.  We found that although similar cognitive tasks elicit N400/theta and P600/beta responses, ERPs and neural oscillations each uncover unique aspects of semantic and syntactic processing, making them complimentary ways to study the question of how the neural processing that support language development. These findings highlight the unique insights that this newly emerging and potentially powerful method of studying language development can reveal. 

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