Psycholinguistics Lab at UTA

Maram Alharbi successfully completed her dissertation, "Visual word recognition and the role of diacritics: Evidence from Arabic". Congratulations, Maram. The committee members were Jeff Witzel and Naoko WItzel as co-chairs, along with Iya Price from the Department of Modern Languages.

Tian Wang presented a poster today at the 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The title of his poster was "Word skipping in L1 and L2 English readers: A multifaceted analysis of parafoveal processing." This was a collaborative project with Jeffrey Witzel, Naoko Witzel, and Iya Price. Here are the pictures of Tian and Jeff giving the presentation.

Maram Alharbi presented her dissertation work, "Visual word recognition and the role of diacritics: Evidence from Arabic vowelization," at the 39th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing yesterday at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was a joint presentation with Naoko Witzel and Jeffrey Witzel. Here are pictures of Maram giving the presentation.

We are very sad to note the passing of Dr. Merrill Garrett. Merrill was a mentor to both of us during our time at the University of Arizona. He was a ground-breaking psycholinguist whose work remains foundational for scholars in our field.

In 2016, Jeff added a bookplate dedicated to Merrill in this volume in the UTA Library:

Cooper, W.E., & Walker, E.C.T. (Eds.). (1979). Sentence processing: Psycholinguistic studies presented to Merrill Garrett. Erlbaum.

This bookplate reads in part as follows:

"This volume, published in 1979, was intended as a Festschrift for Merrill Garrett when he was a faculty member at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Festschrifts are usually published toward the end of an academic's career, often at retirement. This one fell a bit short of that date. After leaving MIT, Merrill went on to head the Cognitive Science program at the University of Arizona, where he was a distinguished teacher and researcher in linguistics and psychology until his "real" retirement, only a few short years ago -- some 30 years after the publication of this Festschrift. During that time, I had the great pleasure of working with Merrill as a PhD student in psycholinguistics, and I continue to be inspired by him and his remarkable contributions to the field."

Merrill was a great scholar and mentor, and he will be sorely missed.

--Jeff and Naoko

Tian Wang successfully defended his Qualifying Paper, "Word skipping in L1 and L2 English readers: A multifaceted analysis of parafoveal processing." This is one of the first studies using our lab's Eye Movement, Reading, and Language Development (EMRLD) Corpus. The committee members were Jeff Witzel (Chair), Iya Price, and Naoko Witzel. Here is a picture of Tian (left) and Jeff (right).

Saffron Swales, an undergraduate student in Linguistics, worked as a research assistant in the Eye Tracking Lab this semester. Saffron was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) from the Office of Undergraduate Research at UTA. Last Friday, she presented her poster at the UROP Poster session. The title of the poster was "Does the Author Recognition Test (ART) Predict L1 and L2 Reading Performance? A Corpus Investigation."

Last Friday, Katherine Johnson presented her senior capstone project, "English Reading Proficiency among Balinese Students" (supervised by Jeff Witzel). Congratulations, Katherine!

Rongchao Tang (PhD 2020) published a paper, "Processing tonal information during visual word recognition in L2 Chinese learners: Evidence from the phonological Stroop task", in the International Journal of Bilingualism. This was a joint project with Naoko Witzel, Xiaomei Qiao (Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, China), and Jia Chen (also from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, China).

Processing tonal information during visual word recognition in L2 Chinese learners: Evidence from the phonological Stroop task - Rongchao Tang, Naoko Witzel, Xiaomei Qiao, Jia Chen, 2025 Aims and Objectives: Given the substantial amount of work indicating how acquiring tonal information is harder than segmental information when L2 Chinese learne...

This past Friday, Tian Wang, a PhD student in our lab, presented his paper, "Word skipping in L1 and L2 English readers: A multifaceted analysis of parafoveal processing", at the 17th Annual DFW Metroplex Linguistics Conference at Dallas International University.

Last weekend, Jeff Witzel presented twice at the Second Language Research Forum at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ. One of the projects -- 'Processing garden-path sentences in L1 and L2: The influence of semantic information on structural analysis' -- was done in collaboration with Xinwen Zhang (UTA PhD '24). The other project -- 'Morphological decomposition in L1 and L2 visual word recognition' -- was collaborative work with Naoko Witzel, Rongchao Tang (UTA PhD '20), and Juliet Huynh (UTA PhD '19).