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.

Jordan Gallant

PhD Student

Research Interests: psycholinguistics; methodological innovation; typed production; morphology; second language acquisition; foreign-accented speech

Jordan enjoys collaborative research and is active in a number of different topic areas. His work aims to broaden the psycholinguistic toolkit by exploring innovative methodologies such as The Maze Task and Typing Task. Much of his on-going research aims to uncover the semantic, affective, phonological, and morphological properties that influence typed production, with a strong focus on compound words. He is also engaged in work using typed transcription to gain insight into the processing foreign-accented speech. During his Ph.D., he aims to continue expanding his methodological skill set to include corpus linguistic, data science, and natural language processing techniques.

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.

Nadia Lana

PhD Student

Research interests:  disinformation

Nadia’s research looks at how psycholinguistic features of texts (e.g., how emotional, exciting, or abstract a text is) affect the reading, processing and understanding of misleading and deceptive texts.

Olga Dvorova

Visiting Research Student

Research interests: language learning, thematic analysis, translation

Olga is a visiting PhD student from Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv in Ukraine and a MA student in Gender and Social Justice at McMaster University. Her MSc research analyzed analytical forms of verbs in the Crimean Tatar language. In her role of Research Assistant at the Reading Lab, she is focusing on written testimonies during the Russia-Ukraine war.

Mariia Hryntus

Visiting Research Student

Research interests: natural language processing, hate speech processing, psycholinguistics, and emotion language

Mariia is a visiting research student from Lviv Polytechnic National University. Her research focuses on understanding the psychological trauma that Ukrainians are experiencing during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. Using over 1000 written narratives, the project gives voice and insight into the experience of Ukrainians. Supervised by Dr. Victor Kuperman, the project will create the first-ever resource that seeks to capture and preserve the emotional and factual immediacy of an emerging collective trauma.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Harshdeep Dhaliwal

Undergraduate Thesis Student

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.

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!

Mariam Bekhet

Research Assistant

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.

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.