Associate Professor, Department of Psychology

My research broadly focuses on speech perception, phonology and reading. I believe a key assumption about language is that it is a biological system, and is thus shaped by evolution and genetics, as well as by such general cognitive factors as attention and working memory.

I study language processing in children with developmental disorders. My main interest is the role of speech perception and phonology in dyslexia and specific language impairments. Work in my lab focuses on speech perception abilities of reading and language impaired children; using eyetracking to measure the time course of auditory word recognition in normally developing and reading impaired children; studying the role of working memory and speech perception in auditory sentence comprehension; and neuroimaging approaches to studying speech processing in language impaired populations

I also study how people learn and process grammatical morphology. A significant debate in psycholinguistics revolves around the status of systematic forms (e.g., regular past tenses like bake-baked) vs. exceptions (e.g., irregular past tenses like take-took). The resolution of this issue can help us better understand the types of brain mechanisms we use to learn all the rules of language.

I also study the brain mechanisms of speech perception and auditory language processing using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Event-Related Potentials (ERPs). I am primarily interested in the brain bases of phonetic processing, compared to other types of auditory signals, and what this could tell us about why some people with language disorders have speech perception deficits. This research is done in collaboration with researchers at the Laboratory for Functional Magnetic Resonance Research at the Robarts Research Institute.

Recent Publications:

Sutton, J. E., Joanisse, M. F. & Newcombe, N. S. (in press). Spinning in the scanner: Neural correlates of virtual reorientation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Malins, J. G., & Joanisse, M. F. (2010). The roles of tonal and segmental information in Mandarin spoken word recognition: An eyetracking study. Journal of Memory and Language, 62(4), 407-420.

Kielar, A., & Joanisse, M.F. (2010). Graded Effects of Regularity in Language Revealed by N400 Indices of Morphological Priming. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22, 1373-98.