Events Calendar

Read a Lot, Talk as Fast as You Can

Speaker: Peter C. Gordon, Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Talk Title: Read a Lot, Talk as Fast as You Can

Abstract: Substantial effort has been devoted to understanding how variability in component cognitive abilities contributes to individual differences in reading skill. As skilled readers rapidly move their eyes through sequences of words, deeper comprehension of earlier words continues while encoding occurs for the word that is currently fixated. Therefore, skilled reading depends on robust, easily accessible word knowledge as well as the ability to efficiently process multiple linguistic units in parallel. The current project investigates how individual differences in each of these skills affect reading ability by examining eye-movement patterns during reading in relation to two very different measures of individual differences: the Author Recognition Task, which primarily taps word knowledge, and Rapid Automatized Naming, which requires rapid responses to a series of items. Results show that word recognition and the ability to coordinate multiple processes in parallel are independent skills, and shed new light on the nature of the cognitive mechanisms underlying reading ability.

Biography: Dr. Peter C. Gordon received his B.S. in Psychology from Georgetown University in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1984. He was Assistant and Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University from 1984 through 1993, and subsequently joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he is Professor of Psychology and Faculty Fellow at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and a superannuated member of the Psychological Round Table; his awards include appointment as John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor at Harvard University and a W.N. Reynolds Leave from the University of North Carolina. He has served as a reviewer for multiple NSF programs (Cognition & Perception, Information & Intelligent Systems and Linguistics) and as a member of the Language and Communication panel at NIH. He served a four-year term as Associate Editor at Psychological Science, has been on the editorial boards of major journals (Cognitive Psychology, JEP:LMC) and in January 2015 will begin a term as Consulting Editor at Psychological Review. Dr. Gordon’s program of research focuses on uncovering the psychological basis of language comprehension and production, with a particular focus on the nature of discourse coherence and on the interaction of discourse-level processing and lower-level processes such as word recognition. His research on the processing of written and spoken language has been highly interdisciplinary, including long-term collaborations with researchers trained in computer science, linguistics and neuroscience, as well as researchers with clinical specializations. His recent research has involved coordinated use of behavioral and neural methods for studying how language processing is coordinated with perception, attention, memory and motor control, and has additionally involved development of eye-tracking and computational-linguistic methods for studying cognitive and interpersonal processes in normal and impaired populations.

Host: Prof. Shrikanth Narayanan

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 132

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Tanya Acevedo-Lam