644 LRDC, Department of Psychology
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Phone: (412) 624-7071. Fax: (412) 624-9149.
Email:perfetti+@pitt.edu

Research Interests:

Research in Dr. Perfetti's laboratory focuses on language and reading,
comparisons of different writing systems, and word, sentence, and
text level processes in normal and brain-damaged subjects. Specific research
topics are described below:

1) Basic Reading Processes: Comparisons Across Writing Systems
This project seeks to discover universal principles of reading,
with a focus on phonological processes, and to investigate how writing systems
accommodate these principles. The research involves experiments in English
and Chinese, some pilot work in Hebrew, and theoretical modeling.

2) Functional Neuroanatomy of Normal and Impaired Language
This work, performed in collaboration with Steve Small at the
Unversity of Maryland, focuses on the behavioral laboratory study of
reading and spoken language tasks that can serve the project's general aims of
discovering the functional brain organization of language through
functional imaging (fmri) techniques.

3) Document Supported History Instruction
This project studies the effectiveness of document-supported text learning
in high school history. It employs a document presentation tutor (the
Sorcerer's Apprentice) to help students learn to attend to information about
documents as well as to their content.

Recent publications:

Berent, I., & Perfetti, C. A. (1995). A rose is a REEZ: The two-cycles model
of phonology assembly in reading English. Psychological Review, 102,
146-184.

Britt, M. A., Rouet, J.-F., & Perfetti, C. A. (1996). Using hypertext to
study and reason about historical evidence. In J.-F. Rouet, J. J. Levonen,
A. P. Dillon, & R. J. Spiro (Eds.), Hypertext and cognition (pp. 43-72).
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Perfetti, C. A., Marron, M. A., & Foltz, P. W. (1996). Sources of
comprehension failure: Theoretical perspectives and case studies. In C.
Cornoldi & J. Oakhill (Eds.), Reading comprehension difficulties: Processes
and intervention (pp. 137-165). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Perfetti, C. A., & Zhang, S. (1995). The universal word identification
reflex. In D. L. Medin (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation
(Vol. 33, pp. 159-189). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Perfetti, C. A., & Zhang, S. (1995). Very early phonological activation in
Chinese reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory,
and Cognition, 21, 24-33.

Small, S. L., Noll, D. C., Perfetti, C. A., Hlustik, P., Wellington, R., &
Schneider, W. (1996). Localizing the lexicon for reading aloud: Replication
of a PET study using fMRI. NeuroReport, 7, 961-965. [Topics: 7, 12] 1996-067