As you can see, we are a friendly group of people who share a common interest in the psychology of language and reading processes.
 
 

Our fearless leader is Chuck Perfetti, seen here in natural habitat:

One of Chuck's favorite pastimes is looking at data:

The experiments we do in the lab are typically computer-based.  We also have an ERP Lab were we measure electrical response potentials during various reading experiments.

Staff

Li Hai Tan

Li Hai is a long time collaborator with Chuck and they have many articles on word recognition and reading processes in Chinese and English.  Li Hai is currently off-site doing MRI experiments in Houston, Texas and Hong Kong.  His active research areas are...

Liu Ying

 

He enjoys doing research on...
 

Graduate Students

Lesley Hart

Rebecca Sandak

Before coming to the Psychology Department and the LRDC, Julie's background was in Linguistics and Computer Science.  She worked for four years on the Soar project at Carnegie Mellon University building a model of language comprehension and generation for real-time agents in the Tactical Air domain.  She received her Master's Degree from Carnegie Mellon in Computational Linguistics.

At Pitt, her reasearch has been in three areas:

Learning from multiple texts.

This project centers around the Sourcer's Apprentice, a Java-based tool designed to provide a multiple text environment for U.S. history students.  Our goal is to assist students in learning document skills such as keeping track of sources, thinking critically about source reliability and bias, and integrating information across sources.

A related project is aimed at understanding why learning from multiple texts is productive, in particular, what constitutes the optimal multiple text set.
 

This project is being done in collaboration with Rick Lewis at Ohio-State University.
Our goal is to provide experimental evidence in support of the interference theory of recovery from garden path sentences (Lewis, 1996).   This theory can be characterized as a working memory capacity theory, but makes specific predictions about the nature of structures which effect parsing recovery.

This project is being done in collaboration with Jim Voss here at LRDC.  It is an outgrowth of Dr. Voss' previous work on causal reasoning in the context of court cases.  We are attempting to tease apart the effects of causality and emotion in subjects' judgments of guilt.  In addition, since the project is text-basesd, we are also interested in identifying individual differences in subjects' judgements based on reading skill.

D.J. Bolger

Suzy Scherf

Mascot

Herschel is our lab's mascot.  Seen here with Julie and Lesley, he is corralled in their office, but has been known to entertain guests on occassion.

If you would  like to learn more about our lab and the research we do, you can email Chuck Perfetti.