Dr. Service has been promoted to Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages

ARiEAL Researcher, Dr. Elisabet Service, has been promoted to the position of Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages, effective July 1, 2020. Dr. Service is the co-director of the Language, Memory & Brain Lab. Her research incorporates three major elements: working memory, language and dyslexia. She started her research career in Helsinki, Finland, by investigating how working memory is involved in learning a second or foreign language. It turned out that phonological aspects of memory, i.e. the ability to form representations for how foreign words sound, were a powerful predictor for ease of language learning. As this type of memory is also critical in learning to read, Dr. Service expanded into research on the causes of dyslexia. Over the years, she has done basic research in the area of memory, but also applied working memory concepts and methods for studying morphological complexity in the mental lexicon, sentence processing, language acquisition, bilingualism, reading difficulty, and developmental language disorder (DLD). Dr. Service is still looking for the elementary cognitive building blocks that play a key role in language development, language learning and successful literacy, lately concentrating on representation of serial order in working memory.

Congratulations, Dr. Service!