Mehrgol Tiv

The broad questions guiding my scientific research run on three main tracks:

I am currently a Posdoctoral Researcher, Data Scientist, and Statistician at the US Census Bureau where I work with really big data (hundreds of millions of people!) to better understand the ecological dynamics of identity. I aim to uplift voices and diversity within racialized communities, such as MENA.

I completed my PhD in experimental psychology with Dr. Debra Titone at McGill University’s Department of Psychology, where I was affiliated with the Centre for Research on Brain, Language, and Music (CRBLM). My research was funded by a doctoral grant from the Quebec Research Funds (Fonds de recherche du Québec), and my work on bilingual social networks was funded by an NSERC CREATE Complex Dynamics trainee grant. The primary methods propelling my experimental work are questionnaires (e.g., social network survey and language history questionnaire), behavioral tasks (e.g., self-paced reading, resource allocation), population statistics (e.g., census), and eye tracking (using SR Research’s Eye Link).

I have some awesome collaborators, including Dr. Ethan Kutlu at the University of Iowa, Dr. Marina Doucerain at Université du Québec à Montréal & Dr. Ross Otto at McGill University.

I strive to promote open science & data sharing. Available data and code lives on OSF & Github.

I would love to share my work with you and your colleagues! Please send me an email to set something up.

Publications [Google Scholar]

Tiv, M. & Spence, C. (2022). Context Diversity Effects Can Generalize Across Social Domains: Relating Racial Diversity to Implicit Associations of Sexual Orientation. Census Working Papers Series.

Feng, R.Y.+, Tiv, M.+, Kutlu, E., Gullifer, J., Palma, P., O’Regan, E., Vingron, N., Doucerain, M., & Titone, D. (in press). The impact of individual differences and social networks on language attitudes in Montréal.

Titone, D. & Tiv, M. (in press). Rethinking Multilingual Experience through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism: Response to Commentaries. Bilingualism: Language & Cognition. 

Tiv, M., O’Regan, E., & Titone, D. (2022). The role of mentalizing capacity and ecological language diversity on irony comprehension in bilingual adults. Memory & Cognition. [read here]

Tiv, M., Kutlu, E., Gullifer, J.G., Feng, R.Y., Doucerain, M.M., & Titone, D. (2022). Bridging Interpersonal and Ecological Dynamics of Cognition through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. [read here]

Kutlu, E., Tiv, M., Wulff, S., & Titone, D. (2022). Does race impact sentence predictability? An account of accented speech in two different multilingual locales. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. [read here]

Tiv, M., Kutlu, E., O’Regan, E., & Titone, D. (2022). Bridging people and perspectives: General and language-specific social network structure predict mentalizing across diverse sociolinguistic contexts. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. [read here]

Titone, D. & Tiv, M. (2022). Rethinking multilingual experience through a Systems Framework of Bilingualism. Invited Keynote in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. [read here]

Tiv, M., Livert, D., Dehrone, T., Godbole, M., López-Aybar, L., Sandanapitchai, P., Peterson, L., Ragin, D.F., & Walker, P. (2021). Effective policy applications of Psychological Science: Drawing parallels between COVID-19 and climate change. Journal of Science Policy and Governance. [read here]

Tiv, M., O’Regan, E., & Titone, D. (2021). In a bilingual state of mind: Investigating the continuous relationship between bilingual language experience and mentalizing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. [read here]

Kutlu, E., Tiv, M., Wulff, S., & Titone, D. (2021). The impact of race on speech perception and accentedness judgments in racially diverse and non-diverse groups.  Applied Linguistics. [read here]

Tiv, M., Deodato, F., Rouillard, V., Wiebe, S., & Titone, D. (2020). Second language experience impacts first language irony processing among bilingual adults. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. [read here]

Tiv, M., Gullifer, J., Feng, R., & Titone, D. (2020). Using Network Science to map what Montréal bilinguals talk about across languages and communicative contexts. Journal of Neurolinguistics. [read here]

Tiv, M., (2020). AI for social good: How psychological researchers can contribute to the socially responsible development of artificial intelligence. In Psychological Science Agenda. [read here]

Tiv, M., Rouillard, V., Vingron, N., Wiebe, S., & Titone, D. (2019). Global second language proficiency predicts self-perceptions of general sarcasm use among bilingual adults. In Journal of Language and Social Psychology. [read here]

Titone, D., Lovseth, K., Kasparian, K., & Tiv, M. (2019). Are figurative interpretations of idioms directly retrieved, compositionally built, or both? Evidence from eye movement measures of reading. In Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. [read here]

Tiv, M., Gonnerman, L., Whitford, V., Friesen, D., Jared, D., & Titone, D., (2019). Figuring out how verb-particle constructions are understood during L1 and L2 reading. In Frontiers in Psychology. [read here]

Titone, D., Tiv, M. & Pexman, P. (2018). The status of women cognitive scientists in Canada: Insights from publicly available NSERC funding data. In Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. [read here]

Tiv, M., Milburn, E., & Warren, T. (2016). Investigating the effects of transparency and ambiguity on idiom learning. In Proceedings of Cognitive Science Society Conference. [read here]

Recent Presentations

Tiv, M. & Spence, C. (2022). Relating Census Bureau Metrics of Contextual Diversity to Implicit Biases. Poster presented at the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues annual conference. San Juan, Puerto Rico. [View poster].

Other Projects

United Nations SPSSI Committee: Moderated panel at the 2020 Canadian Science Policy Conference on Effective Applications of Psychological Science: Drawing Parallels between COVID-19 and Climate Change [video link]

United Nations SPSSI Committee: Content Analysis (using Natural Language Processing) for Elimination of Racism in United Nations Sustainable Development Goals [git]

Tiv, M. & Vingron, N. Pupillary responses to emotional valence : A study on single word reading. Final class paper for methods in Eyetracking [link]

Chen, K. & Tiv, M. Structural connectivity of language and motor areas. Final class paper for High Definition Fiber Tracking [link]

(Data contribution) Whole genome comparison of a large collection of mycobacteriophages reveals a continuum of phage genetic diversity [link]

Tiv, M. Understanding contemporary idiom usage in French and English. Final report for computational linguistics internship with Madarka. [link] — INFOGRAPHICS AVAILABLE: general, semantic categories, frequency, cross-linguistic overlap, linguistic transparency, and specificity.

— A Systems Framework of Bilingualism, in Tiv et al. (2022) and Titone & Tiv (2022) —

— A graphical abstract from my publication in the Journal of Neurolinguistics —