Lab Members

Dr. Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen

Postdoctoral Fellow

Research interests: aging, corpus linguistics, language processing, machine learning

Aki’s current research program is broadly centered on investigating the role of healthy aging on language use. His line of research utilizes methods from experimentation, machine learning and natural language processing. Currently, he is pursuing a number of projects on aging.

Melda Coskun

PhD Student

Research interests: word learning, reading, eye-tracking, corpus linguistics

Melda’s research focuses on understanding how word repetition influences reading and learning. Her current projects investigate this issue in adult native and non-native speakers using different types of words including novel (e.g., wug), simple (e.g., drive), and morphologically complex (e.g., driver, driving) words. She uses different techniques including eye-tracking, corpus linguistics, and EEG to answer this question.

Rudaina Hamed

PhD Student (Co-supervision with Dr. Anna Moro)

Research interests: contact between languages, second language acquisition

Rudaina’s research is focused on investigating how language contact between Arabic and Hebrew affect written Arabic in Israel. The research examines hundreds of Hebrew loanwords in Arabic scripts, collected from Arabic websites intended for Arab readers in Israel, and provides us with an opportunity to gain insights into the roles that geography and audience play on written Palestinian Arabic.

Gaisha Oralova

PhD Student (Co-supervision with Dr. John Connolly)

Research interests: Chinese linguistics, neurolinguistics, visual and spoken word recognition in Chinese, EEG–eye tracking coregistration

Gaisha is currently working on mechanisms of visual word processing under natural reading conditions in English and Mandarin Chinese, which she studies with the help of EEG & Eye-tracking co-registration.

Laura Schwalm

Visiting PhD Student

Research interests: experimental psychology, language processing & reading

Laura is a visiting PhD student from the University of Wuppertal in Germany. Her research is primarily on the development of training in reading skills. Supervised by Dr. Victor Kuperman, she is working on a language comparative corpus analysis here in the reading lab. She is also taking a closer look at the effect of different reading speeds on text comprehension.

Nadia Lana

PhD Student

Research interests: incidental word learning

Nadia is currently working on investigating how new words are learned and what factors might provide a boost to learning. Most new vocabulary, especially in adulthood, is learned incidentally while reading by inferring the meaning. By embedding novel words (e.g., plurk) that denote concrete and abstract concepts into positive, neutral, and negative sentence contexts and then administering post-tests that measure learning, the interaction between concreteness and valence can be studied.

Heather Wild

MSc Student

Research interests: Reading and writing assessments; literacy; corpus linguistics

Currently, Heather is working with text analysis tools to assess college-level writing samples. She is also working with community and research partners to develop domain specific scenario based reading assessments at the college level.

Emilie Altman

MSc Student

Research interests: Spelling errors, syntax, corpus linguistics

Emilie will be investigating spelling errors with respect to syntax. She will be using corpus data to address the question of whether spelling errors are more common in different syntactic roles.

Kaitlyn Battershill

MSc Student

Research interests: literacy and social contexts, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics

Kaitlyn is working on a project investigating linguistic barriers to civic engagement around the world. This project uses international survey data to evaluate how factors such as literacy level, immigration status, and languages spoken affect one’s engagement in society.

Daniil Gnetov

MSc Student

Research interests: reading, morphology, L1 and L2 differences

Daniil’s main project is focused on investigating how differently people read in their L1 and L2. He looks at the distribution of eye-movements during natural reading in English as L1 and L2. Daniil’s side-projects involve modelling morphological family relations using word vectors and investigating pupil’s sensitivity to morphological relations.

Megan Karabin

MSc Student

Research interests: corpus linguistics, syntax, functionalism, COVID-19

Megan’s research explores syntactic complexity in texts written by older adults (55+), collected at various points before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mariam Bekhet

Undergraduate Thesis Student (Co-supervision with Dr. Daniel Pape)

Research interests: production and perception of language, L2 literacy and comprehension

Mariam is currently investigating phonetic aspects of accents that can influence psychological valence perception of emotional texts, while actively assisting with other projects in both the Reading Lab and the Phonetics Lab.

Raluca Petria

Undergraduate Thesis Student

Research interests: the influence of bilingualism on reading ability

Raluca (she/her) is in her final year of the Cognitive Science of Language program at McMaster. Her undergraduate thesis is part of the larger English Reading Online (ENRO) project, a collaborative effort across many universities focused on exploring reading ability and its component skills. Raluca is particularly interested in the effects of bilingualism/multilingualism in this context.

Evonne Syed

Undergraduate Thesis Student

Research interests: psycholinguistics, semantic learning, social communication

Evonne is currently completing her undergraduate thesis project on “How we learn meanings of words”. She was recently awarded an undergraduate student research award, and during the summer of 2021, worked as a student researcher in the lab. Evonne’s thesis extends from her summer research project. With diverse research interests, Evonne contributes as a research assistant in both ARiEAL’s Reading Lab and Turkstra Lab. Also passionate about language beyond the lab, Evonne is a published poet in several local and on-campus publications.

Harshdeep Dhaliwal

Research Assistant

Research interests: reading proficiency

Harshdeep Dhaliwal (she/her) is a third-year undergraduate student in the Honours Biology and PNB program at McMaster. She is a student research assistant and is interested in the effect distracters have on reading proficiency. On the side, Harshdeep enjoys volunteering in the ER, as well as writing blogs for GirlUp McMaster and MHSSN.

Mikayla Schuett

Research Assistant

Research interests: Language production and perception, and psycholinguistics

Mikayla is an undergraduate research assistant in the Reading Lab.

Lucy Thomas

Research Assistant

Research interests: Language and aging, language and emotion

Lucy is a third year undergraduate student in the Cognitive Science of Language program at McMaster University. She is a research assistant in the Reading Lab, where she also works with the Niagara Stories project. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Sciwise, an undergraduate journal that seeks to bridge the gap between the arts and the sciences.

Jolie Luk

Undergraduate Thesis Student

Jolie is an incoming fourth year undergraduate student in the Psychology, Neuroscience, & Behaviour program at McMaster. She is interested in exploring the relationship between bilingualism/multilingualism and word learning. In her free time, Jolie also likes to learn new languages such as French, Spanish, and Korean!