News

Starting in April 2022, the Reading Lab joined ARiEAL in welcoming four scholars from Ukraine, two of whom continue their research in the Reading Lab. Olga Dvorova, a PhD student in Philology from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv is working on a SSHRC-funded project exploring the impact of the pandemic on reading skills in higher education. Mariia Hryntus, a Master’s student in Computational Linguistics from Lviv Polytechnic National University is working on a project on the language of trauma as it emerges during the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society was held November 17-20, 2022 in Boston, MA, USA. This conference brings together researchers that study the fundamental properties of how the mind works by using behavioral techniques to better understand mental functioning.

The 12th Mental Lexicon conference was held in person October 11-14, 2022 in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. The conference brought together psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, and computational research on the representation and processing of words in the mind/brain.

We are so proud of all of our Reading Lab student presenters at Mental Lexicon 2022. Special congrats to MSc student Heather Wild, who won best talk, and PhD student Jordan Gallant, who won best poster!

The full program and abstract book for Student Research Day 2022 has been released! This conference will take place from 9:30 am – 3:30 pm on April 13th, 2022 in room CNH 104.

Dr. Victor Kuperman presented today at the Applied Linguistics Spring Symposium as an invited speaker. Full abstract below:

Reflection of the language background and proficiency in eye-movements while reading texts in English as second language. This talk will present the Multilingual Eye Movements Corpus (MECO), a new collection of eye movements recorded from speakers of 12 languages while reading texts in their L1 and English. The MECO database couples individuals’ eye-tracking data with their scores in component skills of English reading. We examine eye-fixation durations and positions in L2 English reading to estimate and disentangle group-level effects of L1 language background and effects stemming from individual differences in English proficiency. Methodological implications for research into L2 reading are discussed along with directions for future research.

The Reading Lab is hosting a visitor from the University of Turku, Raymond Bertram! We took a tour of the amazing McMichael Canadian Art Collection, which has the largest collection of the Group of 7 and extensive exhibitions of Indigenous art, and after visited the well-reputed Mama Fatma Turkish Cuisine.

The Reading Lab spent a pleasant day between Niagara on the Lake and Niagara Falls, enjoying the sites and visiting local attractions, which included the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre, Fort George National Historic Site, Brock’s Monument, the Butterfly Conservatory, and of course Niagara Falls.

Evonne Syed, undergraduate thesis student, has co-created (co-creator: Imad Ali), in consultation with Dr. Lyn Turkstra, and in partnership with Speech-Language & Audiology Canada, a career guide for Speech Language Pathology aimed at high school students.

Victor Kuperman, Nadia Lana, Melda Coskun, Kaitlyn Battershill, Heather Wild, and Daniil Gnetov presented this week at SSSR’s Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting.

Dr. Victor Kuperman (Co-applicant: Dr. Esther Geva, University of Toronto) was awarded a SSHRC Insight award. The 5-year grant is for the project “Understanding the impact of COVID-19 on reading comprehension in Canadian and US university students: a multi-componential approach”.

What can be done to improve well-being of seniors during COVID-19? Dr. Victor Kuperman appeared before the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development & the Status of Persons with Disabilities (HUMA) to discuss ageism, intergenerational programs, and digital literacy.

Intergenerational programming, such as WritLarge, has been found to help the psychological and emotional well-being of seniors during COVID-19: sharing stories can be therapeutic for seniors battling loneliness.

Evonne Syed has been awarded the summer USRA for her project “How we learn meanings of words.”
Her study asks: How do we build connections between the meanings of newly learned words and the word meanings that we know? Congratulations Evonne, looking forward to seeing the results of your study!

Image Credit: RSVP of Spokane County

The Reading Lab is collaborating with Retired and Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP) of Spokane County to pilot a virtual project that connects students (grades 8-12) with AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers to apply our findings from WritLarge about the social and cognitive benefits of writing and sharing stories.

Sean McCarron and Victor Kuperman’s paper, “Is the Author Recognition Test a Useful Metric for Native and Non-Native English Speakers? An Item Response Theory Analysis” has been accepted into Behavior Research Methods.  

Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen is working to create a non-invasive tool that can help adults experiencing social isolation.

Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen and collaborators used online data to explore the role of lexis and grammar in different genres in new paper, Exploring the role of lexis and grammar for the stable identification of register in an unrestricted corpus of web documents.

Congratulations Gaisha and Dmitry on their new baby boy Ivan. Both the boy and the mother are in great health!

Image Credit: CBC

Victor Kuperman, Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen and team are working on creating a diagnostic tool to identify risk of loneliness in older adults during COVID-19, which they will share with healthcare professionals.

Kelly Nisbet presented “Statistical Learning and Reading: How Motivation Influences This Relation.”

Gaisha Oralova presented “Individual differences in Chinese spelling proficiency as reflected by simultaneous EEG and eye-tracking.”

The Words in the World International Conference (organized by Victor Kuperman, Lori Buchanan and Gary Libben) began today, and the Reading Lab was well represented: Heather Wild, Gaisha Oralova, Melda Coskun, Nadia Lana, and Kelly Nisbet presented, as well as Reading Lab alumni Bryor Snefjella, Sean McCarron and Daniel Schmidtke. The full conference schedule can be found here.

Victor Kuperman and Reading Lab alumni Constance Imbault & Amy Beth Warriner published a paper in collaboration with Debra Titone (McGill University) on how L2 speakers of English perceive English words differently. They conducted a large-scale rating study to measure how non-native readers of English respond to the valence (i.e., positive or negative) and arousal (i.e., exciting or calm) of 2,628 English words. Read it here: How are words felt in a second language: Norms for 2,628 English words for valence and arousal by L2 speakers

Image Credit: MIRA

Victor Kuperman, James Gillett (Social Sciences, McMaster University), Ranil Sonnadara (Health Sciences, McMaster University) and Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen were awarded funding for their project, “Relieving social isolation and loneliness through storytelling at the time of a pandemic.”

Image Credit: McMaster Daily News

Gaisha Oralova was awarded a MacDATA fellowship for her cross-disciplinary project, “Non-parametric regression modelling of time-series data,” that aims at finding and validating a technique for analyzing electrophysiological data.

Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen, Gaisha Oralova, Melda Coskun, Nadia Lana, Vincent Porretta and Victor Kuperman presented at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Montreal.

Image Credit: MacDATA Institute

Melda Coskun was awarded the MacDATA Fellowship for her project  about Twitter data that examines newly popular words.

Paige Cater gave at talk at the McMaster Institute for Research on Aging (MIRA) monthly meeting about her summer Undergraduate Student Research Fellowship (USRF) project, “The effect of aging on language skills,” which looked at the writing of older adults to identify loneliness.

The 20th European Conference on Eye Movements (ECEM 2019) took place from Sunday, August 18th, to Thursday, August 22nd, in Alicante, Spain. Kelly Nisbet presented about her work about factors that influence attaining proficiency in English. Victor Kuperman presented about the Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO), a collaborative international project that addresses the need for comparable cross-linguistic eye-tracking data on reading.

Dr. Aki Kyröläinen, Dr. Vincent Porretta and colleagues have released an R package, PupilPre, for preprocessing eye-tracking data.

Sean McCarron, Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen, Kelly Nisbet, Melda Coskun, Gaisha Oralova, Nadia Lana and Victor Kuperman presented at the 26th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading took place in Toronto from Wednesday, July 17 to Saturday, July 20. 

Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen (Co-applicants: Victor Kuperman and Gary Libben) were awarded the SSHRC Insight Development Grant for their project, “Speaking of age: Linguistic markers of cognitive, emotional and social well-being in late adulthood.”

Bryor Snefjella, Davide Gentile and Constance Imbault presented at the 2019 Society for Personality and Social Psychology Convention. Bryor Snefjella presented “Connecting Dots between Cognitive and Social Psycholinguistics,” Davide Gentile presented “Influences of the Big Five on the Magnitude of Migration,” and Constance Imbault presented “The Chicken or the Egg: Does Being Open Cause People to Migrate, or Does Migration Cause People to Be Open?”

Image Credit: The Times

Bryor Snefjella, Daniel Schmidtke and Victor Kuperman found that Canadians tend to tweet words like “amazing,” and “great” while Americans tend to use curse words.

Image Credit: JD Howell, via CBC

Bryor Snefjella, Daniel Schmidtke and Victor Kuperman analyzed over 40,000 tweets, and found that Canadians may be constructing their “nice” identities through language.

Daniel Schmidtke, Davide Gentile, Aki-Juhani Kyröläinen, and Bryor Snefjella presented at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society.

Image Credit: Brighter World

Victor Kuperman is collaborating with Raymond Bertram (University of Turku, Finland) to carry out research on reading and second languages.

Image Credit: McMaster Daily News

Bryor Snefjella was awarded a MacDATA fellowship for his project “Massive Multilingual Semantic Norm Extrapolation.”

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) has awarded a Partnership Grant for Words in the World, a research and training program led by Gary Libben (Brock University) and leadership team: Victor Kuperman, Lori Buchanan (University of Windsor), Gonia Jarema (University of Montréal), Juhani Järvikivi (University of Alberta) Eva Kehayia (McGill University) and Sid Segalowitz (Brock University).