EdPsych Psycholinguistics Lab, Beckman Institute

04/29/2026

The EdPsych Psycholinguistics Lab is happy to announce recent publication of two papers, lead-authored by former lab member and friend-of-the-lab, Dr. Jack Dempsey, both in the journal Reading & Writing:

Dempsey, J., Christianson, K. & Van D**e, J.A. (2025) Eye-tracking evidence for benefits from linguistically-driven text formatting while reading. Reading and Writing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-025-10716-x

Dempsey, J., Christianson, K., & Van D**e, J.A. (2025). Linguistically-driven text formatting improves reading comprehension for ELLs and EL1s. Reading and Writing, 38, 1107-1128. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-024-10548-1

Typical print formatting provides no information regarding the linguistic features of a text, although texts vary considerably with respect to grammatical complexity and readability. Complex texts may be particularly challenging for individuals with weak language knowledge, such as English language....

06/30/2025

Very pleased indeed to announce a new paper out, spearheaded by lab alum Dr. Anastasia Stoops. Co-authors are another lab alum, Dr. Jack Dempsey and Kiel Christianson:

Two experiments compared morpho-syntactico-semantic parafoveal processing of five-letter words n + 1 (Experiment 1) with five-letter regions at the end of longer words n (Experiment 2), understudied cross-linguistically. Earlier boundary-change studies showed that subject/object case assignment in R...

01/21/2025

The lab is pleased to share a new publication, co-authored by Friend-of-the-Lab Dr. Nigel Bosch and former lab members, Drs. Jack Dempsey, Anna Tsiola, and Mallory Stites! This work was funded by Sandia National Labs, via Dr. Stites.

Unlike text reading, the eye-movement behaviours associated with reading Python, a computer programming language, are largely understudied through a psycholinguistic lens. A general understanding o...

11/21/2024

A great department with four divisions and research ranging from language processing to program evaluation to counseling psychology to psychometrics to developmental psychology to AI and education to bilingualism! And so much more!

Why get your graduate degree in Educational Psychology at Illinois?

🔶 Work with leaders in the field
🔷 Unparalelled student-faculty ratio
🔶 We're home to pioneering research groups like the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA).

Apply to join our top-ten program today: https://education.illinois.edu/edpsy

10/23/2023

The Lab is very pleased to announce a new publication in Discourse Processes:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0163853X.2023.2260246

The authors are Dr. Jack Dempsey (EPSY grad and visiting lab member), Dr. Anna Tsiola (LING grad and former lab member), and Kiel.

Many psycholinguistic studies examine how people parse sentences in isolation; however, years of work in discourse processing have shown that sentence-level interpretations are influenced at some s...

06/12/2023

The lab is happy to announce that a new paper is out with former/current lab members Jack Dempsey and Ella Liu:

Dempsey, J., Liu, Q., & Christianson, K. (2023). Online and offline
evidence for a satiation account of syntactic adaptation. Quarterly Journal of Experiential Psychology.

Syntactic adaptation has been shown to occur for various temporarily ambiguous structures, wherein an initially unexpected resolution becomes easier to process ...

03/31/2023

The Lab is thrilled to announce that Victoria Susberry has successfully defended her dissertation entitled: “Sometimes it’s Exactly as it Seems”: A Mixed Methods Explanatory Case Study of Two Black Women’s Academic Classrooms.

Congratulations DR. Susberry!

02/07/2023

The Lab is happy to announce a new publication by Christianson, Jack Dempsey, Sarah-Elizabeth Deshaies, Anna Tsiola, and Laura Valderrama in the journal "Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience"!

We report an eye-tracking experiment with a trailing boundary-change paradigm as people read subject- and object-relative clauses that were either plausible or implausible. We sought to determine w...

11/22/2022

EdPsych Psycholinguistics Lab is pleased to announce athat a new paper is out. First author is "Gob" Rattansak, a Fulbright Scholar who visited our lab for a semester pre-covid:

Rattanasak, S., Pongpairoj, N., & Christianson, K. (Sept. 2022, accepted). Effects of working memory capacity and distance-based complexity on agreement processing: A Crosslinguistic competition account. Applied Linguistics Review.

05/09/2022

The EdPsych Psycholinguistics Lab is pleased to announce a new paper, with THREE former lab members!

Christianson, K., Dempsey, J., Tsiola, A., & Goldshtein, M. (in press, 2022). What if they’re just not that into you (or your experiment)? On motivation and psycholinguistics. Psychology of Learning & Motivation.

Participants in psycholinguistic experiments are typically asked to read or listen to dozens of individual, uncontextualized, disconnected sentences, …