- Psychology of Reading

Catalog description

Addresses the cognitive and neuroscientific underpinnings of “the most remarkable specific performance that civilization has learned in all its history” (Huey, 1908). That is, the ability to read. How do reading skills develop and how should reading be taught? What parts of the brain enable us to read? What causes reading disorders such as dyslexia? Students will answer questions such as these as they investigate the scientific research behind how the mind and brain process written text. Theory, research, and application will all be considered. Topics will include the cognitive processes involved in reading, experimental techniques such as masked priming, eye-tracking, and fMRI, sentence and discourse comprehension, neural bases of normal skilled reading and reading disorders, and models of visual word recognition and eye-movement control.