Introduction
Ever since her first encounter as a school child with Standard Persian in the books and as spoken by the teachers, an experience which fascinated her by its sheer difference from the language she knew and spoke, Fatemeh Nemati has had a burning desire to explore the intricate nature of words and sentences in languages: their formation, usage and meaning. Although her childhood fantasy was to become an astronaut, she studied in a teacher training boarding school to equip herself for a journey on earth to discover many worlds in the eyes, hearts and minds of students, surpassing what she might have found in the skies. Still perplexed by the world of words and enchanted with the diversity of worlds to probe in her career, she joined English Language and Literature Department at Persian Gulf University in 2011. She has received her BA and MA in English Language and Literature from Shiraz University (2000) and University of Tehran (2003) respectively and her MA and PhD in General Linguistics from Trabiat Modares University (2006) and University of Tehran (2011). During her PhD studies, she spent a year (2009-2010) in Konstanz University (Germany) as a visiting researcher where she worked under the supervision of Prof. Miriam Butt on Persian complex predicates in a lively and engaging academic environment. Besides teaching and supervising MA students, she leads the Persian Gulf Language, Culture and Cognition research team whose primary research interests fall into two broad areas: the dialectological, sociolinguistic and cultural investigations of the Persian Gulf coastal areas; and the cognitive studies of language processing and learning. In line with the mission of the research team, she is now collaborating with Chris Westbury (University of Alberta) in the Persian Lexicon Project; with Erik Anonby (Carleton University) in the Atlas of the Languages of Iran (ALI) as the supervisor of the Bushehr province language documentation; and with Dina El Zarka as the local researchers in a project on the language of the Arabs in southern Iran. Her ongoing funded research projects with the research team are:
1- Modeling the effect of lexical measures on Persian and English word processing by Persian learners of English (Fatemeh Nemati, Chris Westbury, Maryam Hamedaninezhad, Fatemeh Farajpour, Fatemeh Basouli, Maryam Rezaei funded by Cognitive Sciences and Technologies Council)
2- Developing Persian Affective Norms of Fundamental Emotional Dimensions Using Best-Worst Judgment Scoring (Fatemeh Nemati, Chris Westbury, Habib Rostami, Fatemeh Alavi funded by Iran National Science Foundation)
3- A Critical Analysis of Gender in Arabic Proverbs in the Northern Area of Persian Gulf (Rasoul Ballawi, Fatemeh Nemati, Sadegh Alboughbish funded by Iran National Science Foundation)
Also related in their scope to the mission of the research team, MA theses supervised by her mostly focus on foreign language learning and processing from a psycholinguistic perspective, with the ultimate goal of facilitating the process by treasuring the cognitive resources human beings are born with. So far, eleven theses (three completed and defended) have received financial support from the Cognitive Sciences and Technologies Council of Iran.