Projects past and present

As an Open Science enthusiast, I believe that all research output should be openly available. This is why I have provided links, for each project, to the experimental materials, data, analysis scripts, and full texts, even for unpublished studies. Please be aware that not all of the studies linked here have the seal of approval of peer review - I have tried to mark them clearly as "preprints".

Below are brief descriptions of the projects. For more information, and links to full texts, data and materials, please click the corresponding link in the menu on the left hand side.

In 2022, I took up my old passion of cross-linguistic reading research again. I received funding from the DFG to conduct a study on single-word and pseudoword reading and spelling, involving 16 languages (for study proposal, see here).

During my PhD, I studied cognitive processes underlying skilled reading and reading acquisition in German and English. My PhD advisors were Dr. Eva Marinus, Prof. Anne Castles, and Prof. Max Coltheart. You can find the full text of my thesis, "Methodological and theoretical issues in cross-linguistic reading research" here, at the Macquarie University website.

There are many theories of what is causing Developmental Dyslexia, and very little consensus. Specifically, many studies report some cognitive deficit in a group of participants with dyslexia, and follow-up studies fail to show such a group difference. This low replicability rate makes Developmental Dyslexia an interesting case study from the perspective of the Replication Crisis. We are working on a DFG-funded project to identify theoretical, methodological, and statistical issues that are related to replicability of studies testing theories of Developmental Dyslexia.

Converting orthography to phonology is an important part of the reading process. Using the knowledge of the correspondences between letters or letter clusters and their pronunciations allows children (and adults) to read aloud words that they have never seen in the written form before. In order to understand how children learn to read, and how the learning process may be impaired in developmental dyslexia, it is important to understand how exactly we translate print to speech.

Statistical learning refers to the ability to (implicitly) extract regularities from the environment and to apply them to predict future events. To date, it is not clear whether a statistical learning process is involved in the process of learning to read, or which exact reading-related regularities benefit from the process and how they facilitate reading. Two related questions are: Is a domain-general statistical learning skill important for reading acquisition? And is a statistical learning deficit a possible cause of developmental dyslexia?

Models of single-word reading are arguably the most well-specified models in cognitive psychology. But while we have a good understanding of the cognitive processes underlying reading, there is less systematic research about how the importance of these processes changes when we embed words in sentences.