Laura Halderman
I completed my B.A. in psychology at the University of Kansas in May 2001. During my senior year, I completed a senior honors thesis under the supervision of Dr. Ruthann Atchley. My project examined phonological processing via pseudohomophones (i.e. RANE, TAYBUL) in college-age adults with reading-based developmental learning disabilities. The pseudohomophone effect is observed in lexical decision due to the conflict of the phonology and orthography of these special nonwords. RTs are typically longer for pseudohomophones as compared to real words and even nonwords. Due to the impaired phonological processing in individuals with DLD, the pseudohomophone effect is typically absent, presumably because of the lack of proper grapheme-to-phoneme conversions.
I am currently conducting an experiment for my M.A. which looks at phonological processing in the right hemisphere. Many projects in the past have used rhyme judgement or other meta-linguistic tasks that may create a biased lack of evidence for phonological processing in the RH. I have chosen to use backward masking and divided visual field presentation to examine the role of phonology in the RH in word recognition. For each trial, there is a forward mask consisting of a row of Xs, a target word in lower case, a nonword mask and finally, another row of Xs. The nonword masks consist of pseudohomophones (a nonword letter string that shares the same phonology with the target word), an orthographically similar mask (a nonword that shares the same letters in the same position that the pseudohomophones share with the target words, but shares limited phonology), and an unrelated mask (no orthography or phonology is shared). To measure responses, I'm using a two-alternative forced choice to collect RTs and accuracies. Two words are presented, the target word and a flanker that differs from the target by one letter. In the backward masking paradigm, it is particularly important that subjects are not aware of the presentation of the nonword mask. It is because of this lack of perception that I feel this task may allow me to investigate the phonological capabilities of the RH better than previously used meta-linguistic types of tasks.
CONTACT INFO
E-mail - laurakh@citrus.ucr.edu
Office - (909)787-0568