Dr. Victor Kuperman
Dr. Victor Kuperman (PhD Radboud University Nijmegen, 2008) is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages, the Canada Research Chair in Psycholinguistics, and the Director of the Reading Lab at McMaster University. Dr. Kuperman specializes in several areas of psycholinguistics and quantitative linguistics, including experimental and corpus-based approaches to morphology, and probabilistic models of visual comprehension. He is also interested in cognitive, oculomotor, and computational aspects of eye-movement behavior in reading, as well as in individual differences in literacy acquisition and text comprehension. The research paradigms of the Reading Lab that Dr. Kuperman leads include eye-tracking and other behavioral studies, large-scale norming studies, and quantitative analyses of written and spoken corpora.
Email: vickup@mcmaster.ca
Office Phone: (905) 525-9140 x20384
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.
Yaqian Bao
PhD Student
Research interests: Cognitive mechanisms during reading; Reading comprehension; Cross-language comparison
Bao’s research focus on exploring both universal and specific reading mechanisms across different writing systems. Bao interested in the intricacies of how the human brain decodes written words, retrieves their meanings, employs syntactic rules to organize them into coherent grammatical units, and establishes connections across sentences within the text and with broader external knowledge to create a unified and cohesive mental representation of the text’s meaning.
Email: baoy47@mcmaster.ca
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.
Email: gallaj20@mcmaster.ca
Marc-Antoine Paul
PhD Student
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: language learning, embodied cognition
Nadia’s research looks at how psycholinguistic features of texts (e.g., how emotional, exciting, or abstract a text is) affect the processing and learning of new words.
Email: kryvobon@mcmaster.ca
José García
Visiting Research Student
Research interests: Psycholinguistics; Text comprehension and processing.
José is a visiting graduate student from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso in Chile. He studies the impact of individual differences on readers’ processing and comprehension of cognitive challenges in texts. His work focuses specifically on how readers navigate incongruences, misinformation, and belief-inconsistent information.
Email: garcaj@mcmaster.ca
Olga Dvorova
Research Assistant
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.
Keerat Purewal
MSc Student
Morgan Johnson
Research Assistant
Brianna Griska-Macphee
Undergraduate Thesis Student
Brianna is a fourth-year undergraduate research assistant who is completing her thesis under the supervision of Dr. Victor Kuperman and Jordan Gallant. She is very interested in the phenomenon of reading, and is currently researching the ability to process information in the parafoveal portion of the field of vision. Brianna has been working with the Reading Lab on a multitude of projects over the last two years.
Alexandra Jackson
Research Assistant
Alexandra is a fourth-year Cognitive Science of Language student and undergraduate research assistant in the Reading Lab. She is currently running eye-tracking experiments and has worked on various projects over the past two years.
Simran Gill
Research Assistant