ARiEAL Researcher, Dr. Victor Kuperman at the Reading Lab, is hosting a one-day workshop on “How to gain insight into reading processes – recreating (or improving) eye-tracking studies from the Turku eye-movement lab” on May 9, 2018. The workshop will be presented by Dr. Raymond Bertram from Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology at University of Turku.

How does reading skill progress during elementary school years? Is there a difference in reading skill between high-school and university students? Does Finnish morphology confuse the L2 speaker? To what extent Finnish L2-speakers of English use the phonological route? Are L2-speakers of English – just like English natives – having more difficulties with words that are often misspelled? Whatcuesareweusingwhenwehavetoreadwithoutspaces? And to what extent interword spaces are beneficial when reading a normally unspaced language like Chinese? How does visual acuity interact with morphological complexity? And last but not least, is the English disease really a disease?

There will be three 1-1.5 hours sessions to address these questions. Dr. Raymond Bertram will first give a 1.5-hour lecture in which he will provide basic knowledge on linguistic features of Finnish and Chinese; allomorphy, homophony and processing routes in L1 and L2 reading; cross-linguistic transfer and other information needed to formulate answers to the questions listed above. The next session will be a 1-hour workshop in which students try to formulate answers to these questions and/or create potential experiments that may answer them. In the third session, the focus will be on how the students’ answers/proposals compare to (the results of) the experiments actually conducted.