Emily and Sara presented research posters at CUNY this year at University of Colorado Boulder. Find their posters and others from the session online at https://osf.io/view/CUNY2019/
Sara’s project titled “Frequency, predictability & lexical quality effects: individual differences in reading & proofreading” showed a reanalysis (Schotter et al., 2014) seeking to elucidate the patterns of individual differences within commonly seen effects like word frequency and sentence context. She further explored individuals sensitivity to orthotactic and phonotactic patterns of the English language.
Emily’s poster entitled “Enhanced peripheral lexical processing in deaf individuals: perceptually or linguistically driven?” is a collaboration with Dr. Amy Lieberman of Boston University. She presented preliminary results from three experiments of deaf signers’ peripheral processing abilities, demonstrating a sign superiority effect, whereby deaf signers are able to utilize lexical knowledge to facilitate processing of information under difficult tasks demands (i.e. when information is briefly presented at an extreme eccentricity in the periphery).
Congratulations to Anna Marie on receiving the Psi Chi Undergraduate Research Grant for the 2019 Spring Semester to fund her honors thesis! Her project investigates whether the cognitive mechanisms shared between music and language processing rely on working memory resources necessary for syntactic processing. She will use a dual-task approach in which people read syntactically complex sentences while holding onto items in memory (words, musical phrases, or visual layouts of dots) and will compare performance between musicians and non-musicians.
