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Victor Kuperman

Dr. Victor Kuperman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages and the Director of the Reading Lab at McMaster University. He received his PhD in psycholinguistics from Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands in 2008 and held a post-doctoral appointment at the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University.

Dr. Kuperman specializes in several areas of psycholinguistics and quantitative linguistics, including experimental and corpus-based approaches to morphology, and probabilistic models of visual comprehension. He is also interested in cognitive, oculomotor, and computational aspects of eye-movement behavior in reading, as well as in individual differences in literacy acquisition and text comprehension. The research paradigms of the Reading Lab that Dr. Kuperman leads include eye-tracking and other behavioral studies, large-scale norming studies, and quantitative analyses of written and spoken corpora.

Expandable List

Togo Salmon Hall, Room 510, McMaster University
1280 Main Street West
Email: vickup@mcmaster.ca
Office Phone: (905) 525-9140 x20384

Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics and Languages, McMaster University
Director, Reading Lab, McMaster University
Research Scientist, Haskins Laboratories
Associate member, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, McMaster University

Battershill, K. & Kuperman, V. (2023). A bird’s eye view of civic engagement and its facets: Canonical Correlation Analysis across 34 countries. Journal of Civic Society, 19 (4), 437-463.

Battershill, K., & Kuperman, V. (2023). Linguist is as linguist does: A comparative study on the employment and income of graduates from linguistics programs in Canada. Language, 99(4), 191-209.

Coskun, M., Kuperman, V., & Rueckl, J. (2023). Long-lag repetition priming in natural text reading: No evidence for morphological effects. Mental Lexicon, 18(1), 1-40.

Karabin, M., Kyröläinen, A.-J., & Kuperman, V. (2023). Increase in linguistic complexity in older adults during COVID-19. Experimental Aging Research, 1-19.

Kuperman, V., Siegelman, N., Schroeder, S. … & Usal, K. (2023). Text reading in English as a second language: Evidence from the Multilingual Eye-Movements Corpus (MECO). Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 45(1), 3-37.

Kyröläinen, A.-J., Gillett, J., Karabin, M., Sonnadara, R., & Kuperman, V. (2023). Cognitive and social well-being in older adulthood: the CoSoWELL corpus of written life stories. Behavior Research Methods, 55 (6), 2885-2909.

Kyröläinen, A.-J. & Kuperman, V. (2023). Emotional state of older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic: Insights from the Cognitive and Social Well-Being (CoSoWELL) corpus. Experimental Aging Research, 0(0), 1-24.

Lana, N. & Kuperman, V. (2023). Learning concrete and abstract novel words in emotional contexts: Evidence from incidental vocabulary learning. Language Development and Learning, 20(2), 158-173.

Parshina, O., Zdorova, N., & Kuperman, V. (2023). Cross-linguistic comparison in reading sentences of uniform length: Visual-perceptual demands override readers’ experience. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 0(0).

Siegelman, N., Elgort, I., Brysbaert, M. … Kuperman, V. (2023). Re-thinking L1/L2 Similarities and Differences in English Proficiency: Insights from the English Reading Online (ENRO) Project. Language Learning, 74(1), 249-294.

Zasiekina, L., Zasiekin, S., & Kuperman, V. (2023). Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Moral Injury Among Ukrainian Civilians During the Ongoing War. Journal of Community Health, 48(5), 784–792 .

Zasiekin, S., Kuperman, V., Hlova, I., & Zasiekina, L. (2022). War stories in social media: Personal experience of Russia-Ukraine war. East European Journal of Psycholinguistics, 9(2).

Kyröläinen, A.-J., Luke, J., Libben, G., & Kuperman, V. (2022). Valence norms for 3,600 English words collected during the COVID-19 pandemic: Effects of age and the pandemic. Behavior Research Methods, 54(5), 2445-2456.

Kuperman. V. (2022) A cross-linguistic study of spatial parameters of eye-movement control during reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Performance and Perception,48(11), 1213–1228.

Wild, H. A., Kyröläinen, A.-J. & Kuperman, V. (2022). How representative are student convenience samples? A study of literacy and numeracy skills in 32 countries. PLOS One. 17(7): e0271191

Kuperman, V. (2022). Effects of linguistic distance on cognitive skills, health, and social outcomes in Canadian immigrants. Frontiers in Political Science, 4:874195. doi: 10.3389/fpos.2022.874195

Nisbet, K., Bertram, R., Erlinghagen, C., Pieczykolan, A., & Kuperman, V. (2022). Quantifying the difference in reading fluency between L1 and L2 readers of English. Studies of Second Language Acquisition, 44(2), 407-434.

McCarron, S. P. & Kuperman, V. (2022). Effects of Year of Post-Secondary Study on Reading Skills for L1 and L2 Speakers of English. Journal of Research in Reading, 45(1), 43-64.

Jaggers, K., Gillett, J., Kuperman, V., Kyröläinen, A.-J., & Sonnadara, R. (2022). Personhood and aging: Exploring the written narratives of older adults as articulations of personhood in later life. Journal of Aging Studies, 62, 101040.

Wild, H. and Kuperman, V. (2022). Technical report on using in-house English-speaking assessments to place Mohawk College students in communication classes. McMaster University.

Oralova, G. and Kuperman, V. (2021). Probabilistic Cues in Chinese Word Segmentation. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 765335.

Kuperman, V., Bar-On, A., Bertram, R., Boshra, R., Deutsch, A., Kyröläinen, A.-J., Mathipolou, V., Oralova, G., & Protopapas, A. (2021). Prevalence of spelling errors affects reading behavior across languages. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(10), 1974–1993.

Kyröläinen, A.-J. and Kuperman, V. (2021). The effect of loneliness on cognitive functioning among healthy individuals in mid- and late adulthood: Evidence from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA). Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 3744.

McCarron, S. and Kuperman, V. (2021). Is the Author Recognition Test a Useful Metric for Native and Non-Native English Speakers? An Item Response Theory Analysis. Behavior Research Methods, 53(5), 2226—2237.

Kuperman, V., Kyröläinen, A.-J., Porretta, V., Brysbaert, M., and Yang, S. (2021). A lingering question addressed: Reading rate and most efficient listening rate are highly similar. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 47(8), 1103–1112.

Maslej, M., Mar, R., and Kuperman, V. (2021). The Textual Features of Fiction that Appeal to Readers: Emotion and Abstractness. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 15(2), 272—283.

Kyröläinen, A.-J., Keuleers, E., Mandera, P., Brysbaert, M., and Kuperman, V. (2021). Affect across the life span: Evidence from English, Dutch and Spanish. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(4), 792–812.

Imbault, C., Titone, D., Warriner, A.-B., and Kuperman, V. (2021). How are words felt in a second language: Norms for 2,628 English words for valence and arousal by non-native speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 24(2), 281—292.

Kyröläinen, A.-J. & Kuperman, V. (2021). Predictors of literacy in adulthood: Evidence from 33 countries. PLoS ONE. 16(3): e0243763

Schmidtke, D., Van Dyke, J.A., and Kuperman, V. (2021). CompLex: An eye-movement database of compound word reading in English. Behavior Research Methods, 53(1), 59–77.

Snefjella, B., Kryvobok, N., and Kuperman, V. (2020). How emotion is learned: Semantic learning of novel words in emotional contexts. Journal of Memory and Language, 115. 104171.

Kuperman, V. & Deutsch, A. (2020). Morphological and visual cues in compound word reading: Eye-tracking evidence from Hebrew. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 73(12), 2177–2187.

Bertram, R. and Kuperman, V. (2020). The English disease in Finnish compound processing: Backward transfer effects in Finnish-English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(3), 579-590.

Schmidtke, D., & Kuperman, V. (2020). Psycholinguistic methods and tasks in morphology. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford University Press.

Nisbet, K., Généreux, M., Anderson, B., and Kuperman, V. (2019). Clozapp: A Java Application for Collecting and Recording Cloze Probability Norms. The Mental Lexicon, 14(3), 399—414.

Bridgwater, E., Kyröläinen, A.-J., and Kuperman, V. (2019). The influence of syntactic expectations on reading comprehension is malleable and strategic an eye-tracking study of English dative alternation. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73(3), 179–192.

Snefjella, B., Genereux, M., and Kuperman. V. (2019). Historical evolution of concrete and abstract language revisited. Behavior Research Methods, 51(4), 1693–1705.

Schmidtke, D. and Kuperman, V. (2019). A paradox of apparent brainless behavior: The time-course of compound word recognition. Cortex, 116, 250—267.

Bar-On, A., and Kuperman, V. (2019). Spelling errors respect morphology: A corpus study of Hebrew orthography. Reading and Writing, 32 (5), 1107-1128.

Deutsch, A. and Kuperman, V. (2019). Formal and semantic effects of morphological families on word recognition in Hebrew. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34(1), 87-100.

Kuperman, V. and McCarron, S. (2019). Technical report on reading-related abilities of Mohawk College students enrolled in Communication classes. McMaster University.

Rahmanian, S. and Kuperman, V. (2019). Spelling errors impede recognition of correctly spelled word forms. Scientific Studies of Reading, 23 (1), 24-36.

Schmidtke, D., Gagne, C., Kuperman, V., Spalding, T., and Tucker, B. (2018). Conceptual relations compete during auditory and visual compound word recognition. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 33(7), 923-942.

Henry, R., Van Dyke, J. A., and Kuperman, V. (2018). Oculomotor Planning in RAN and Reading: A Strong Test of the Visual Scanning Hypothesis. Reading and Writing, 31(7), 1619–1643.

Schmidtke, D., Gagne, C., Kuperman, V., and Spalding, T. (2018). Language experience shapes relational knowledge of compound words. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. 33(7), 923-942.

Imbault, C., Shore, D., and Kuperman, V. (2018). Reliability of the sliding scale for collecting affective responses to words. Behavior Research Methods, 50(6), 2399–2407.

Snefjella, B., Schmidtke, D., Kuperman, V. (2018) National character stereotypes mirror language use: A study of Canadian and American tweets. PLoS ONE 13(11): e0206188.

Schmidtke, D., Van Dyke, J. A., & Kuperman, V. (2018). Individual variability in the semantic processing of English compound words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(3), 421–439.

Schmidtke, D., Matsuki, K., & Kuperman, V. (2017). Surviving blind decomposition: A distributional analysis of the time-course of complex word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43(11), 1793–1820.

Schmidtke, D., Kuperman, V., Gagné, C. L., & Spalding, T. L. (2016). Competition between conceptual relations affects compound recognition: the role of entropy. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 23(2), 556–570.

Kuperman, V., Van Dyke, J. A., & Henry, R. (2016). Eye-movement control in RAN and reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 8438(January), 1–16.

Kuperman, V. (2015). Virtual experiments in megastudies: a case study of language and emotion. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68(8), 1693–1710.

Snefjella, B., & Kuperman, V. (2015). Concreteness and Psychological Distance in Natural Language Use. Psychological Science, 26(9), 1449–60.

Kuperman, V., Estes, Z., Brysbaert, M., & Warriner, A. (2014). Emotion and language: Valence and arousal affect word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1065–1081.

Kuperman, V., & Van Dyke, J. A. (2013). Reassessing word frequency as a determinant of recognition for skilled and unskilled readers. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39(3), 802–823.

Warriner, A. B., Kuperman, V., & Brysbaert, M. (2013). Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 45(4), 1191–1207.

Kuperman, V., Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H., & Brysbaert, M. (2012). Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods, 44, 978–990.

Kuperman, V., & Van Dyke, J. A. (2011). Effects of individual differences in verbal skills on eye-movement patterns during sentence reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 65(1), 42–73.

Kuperman, V., Schreuder, R., Bertram, R., & Baayen, R. H. (2009). Reading polymorphemic Dutch compounds: Toward a multiple route model of lexical processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 35(3), 876–895.

Kuperman, V., Bertram, R., & Baayen, R. H. (2008). Morphological dynamics in compound processing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23(7–8), 1089–1132.

  • Yaqian Bao PhD Student, Cognitive Science of Language, Department of Linguistics and Languages, McMaster University
  • Jordan Gallant, PhD Student (Co-supervision), Cognitive Science of Language Program, McMaster University
  • Rudaina Hamed, PhD Student (Co-supervision), Cognitive Science of Language Program, McMaster University
  • Nadia Lana, PhD Student, Cognitive Science of Language, Department of Linguistics and Languages, McMaster University