Early this month, several undergraduate research assistants from EMaC Lab presented at the Spring 2019 PURE hosted by the Office of Undergraduate Research at USF. Jamie presented preliminary results from her undergraduate honors thesis titled “Semantic Priming: Individual Differences in Automaticity”. Replicating earlier semantic priming studies and investigating the effects of individuals’ reading/language abilities. She found that readers with better comprehension (as assessed using the PIAT-R) showed less dual-task interference during a semantic categorization task, suggesting they identify the meanings of words more automatically.

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/

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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 our graduating senior, Jamie! She just accepted an offer for graduate school in the Psychology Department at the University of Florida. She will be joining the “Brain, Cognition and Development Lab” under the direction of Dr. Lisa Scott. There she will study learning and brain development using a variety of measures including brain responses (ERPs), eye-movements, and behavioral responses.

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.

Emily presented her poster entitled “Peripheral Attention and American Sign Language” at the WORLD conference in Spain last week. The conference focused on language and deafness and facilitated an open and honest discussion by researchers and clinicians of different perspectives. It was exciting to hear from panelists as they discussed the future of the field.

Congratulations Alex on winning the Best Poster Award at the USF Psychology Department’s Annual Research Exposition in October, 2018. His poster was titled “Individual Differences In Parafoveal Preview Effects When Preview And Target Differ In Reading: An Exploration of the Reversed Preview Benefit Effect”.

USF had the honor of hosting the 4th Annual Florida Psycholinguistics Meeting on October 13th. Psycholinguists and scholars from related fields around the state came together to share research and gain new perspectives on various topics and research techniques. Many of our undergraduates from EMaC Lab presented fabulous posters at the conference.

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Anna Marie & Zoe discussed “Using Implausible Previews to Study Parafoveal Processing”, data from an upcoming manuscript.

Alex presented his poster entitled “Individual Differences In Parafoveal Preview Effects When Preview And Target Differ In Reading: An Exploration of the Reversed Preview Benefit Effect”.

Danielle, Alexis, & Julianna presented preliminary data from “How Do Individual Differences Influence Reading Efficiency?”

Jamie showcased oral reading data with her poster “Assessing Parafoveal Preview Effects Through Eye Movements and Oral Reading”.

 

Dr. Liz Schotter and Emily Johnson have received a Nexus Initiative Award from USF. The grant will allow them to travel back and forth to Boston University to continue collaborating with Dr. Amy Lieberman from the Deaf studies program there. Their work focuses on Deaf signers’ visual attention and language perception.

Richard Rogers has been nominated for a Research Excellence Award for his poster “The Impact of Unexpected Stimuli in Cloze Tasks on Cloze Probability and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)” presentation at the USF OUR Colloquium this past week. Congratulations!

On April 19th, 2018 Caitlin, Danielle, & Richard each presented research at the USF Undergraduate Research Conference; an event annually hosted by the Office of Undergraduate Research. They gave great poster presentations!

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Observed Effects of Clustering Coefficient and Neighborhood Size During Word Recognition by Caitlin Nethercoat:

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How Individual Differences in Language Ability Influence Reading Efficiency by Danielle Ferrusi:

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The Impact of Unexpected Stimuli in Cloze Tasks on Cloze Probability and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) by Richard Rogers: