About Us

Principal Investigator, Director 

Kiel Christianson, Ph.D. 

Professor & Associate Chair, Department of Educational Psychology

My research is influenced and informed by linguistic theory, as well as by cognitive psychology. My goal is to make deeper, broader connections between linguistics and various sub-fields of cognitive science. Overarching themes in my present work are (mis)interpretation in sentence processing, morphological processing during reading, and crosslinguistic research. At present I am focusing on rereading behaviors (i.e., measures related to rereading) in order to determine what, if any, relation they have to post-interpretive measures of comprehension (e.g., accuracy in responses to comprehension questions). A large proportion of my work connects to Good Enough Language Processing, a theory developed over the past 20 years with several colleagues. One recent expansion of this work is auditory perceptual simulation (APS), which describes readers’ consciously imagining a voice in their heads while reading. (Read more about APS at https://distributedmuseum.illinois.edu/exhibit/auditory-perceptual-simulation/).

Lab Manager & Graduate Student
Danyi Chen

Danyi Chen is a doctoral student in the Educational Psychology department. Her research primarily focuses on bilingual language processing and second language acquisition. She is currently working on projects that investigate code-switching in reading and how that influences comprehension in the bilingual mind. In her free time, she likes reading, playing video games, and annoying her cat.
Graduate Student
Emily Hall
Emily Hall is a doctoral student in Educational Psychology.  She integrates her experience as a literacy specialist and former middle school educator with the goal of making research on the neural basis of reading more accessible and practical, especially for neurodiverse adolescents. Specifically, she is interested in how to mitigate the “digital decline” that occurs in comprehension on a screen vs. in print by creating inclusive EdTech solutions. She enjoys traveling back to her home in Kenya, cycling, and being outdoors as much as possible.
Graduate Student
Mohit Gupta
Mohit’s computational psycholinguistics research focuses on understanding how people read, how words influence their thoughts and emotions, and how reading alters the brain. He uses eye-tracking as a way to track active brain focus. His qualitative findings are used to incorporate human behavior into Natural Language Computational Algorithms that analyze human-generated text data.
Graduate Student
Seonghan Jin

Seonghan Jin is a doctoral student in the Cognitive Science of Teaching and Learning (CSTL) division of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
His focal research areas are Second Language Acquisition and Reading Comprehension, with a particular interest in how to improve L2 learners’ language proficiency and how individual differences (e.g., working memory, vocabulary knowledge) influence their proficiency. He also investigates how L2 learners read and comprehend words, sentences, and passages in their target language across various contexts.
He is an active Army officer in the Republic of Korea Army, serving in the Armor branch. Before joining the lab, he taught Military English to cadets in the Department of English at the Korea Military Academy for six years. He has published articles on L2 anxiety and L2 willingness to communicate in journals such as the Journal of Language and Social Psychology and System.
In his free time, he enjoys hiking, running, and weightlifting.

Former Graduate Students

Jeong-Ah Shin (PhD, EPSY) – Associate Professor (with tenure), Dongguk University,

Seoul, S. Korea (Graduated Dec., 2008)

Ji Hyon Kim (PhD, LING, dissertation director & advisor) – Chair, School of English for Interpretation and Translation, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, S. Korea (Graduated Dec., 2008)

Kent Lee (PhD, EPSY) – Assistant Professor (Tenure-track), Pukyoung National University, Busan, S. Korea (Graduated May, 2009)

Sun-A Kim (PhD, East Asian Languages and Cultures) Associate Professor (with tenure), Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong (Graduated May, 2010)

Heeyoun Cho (PhD, LING) – Associate Professor (with tenure), Seoul National University, Seoul (Graduated Dec., 2010)

Steven G. Luke (M.S., PhD, EPSY) – Professor (with tenure), Brigham Young University, Provo, UT (Graduated May, 2011)

Jung Hyun Lim (PhD, EPSY) –Research Professor, Konkuk University, Seoul, Korea (Graduated May, 2011)

Gabrielle Jones (PhD, EPSY) – Associate Professor (with tenure), University of California, San Diego

Kacey Wochna (MS, EPSY) – Instructional Designer, LSA Opportunity Hub, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Graduated May, 2012)

Anastasia Stoops (PhD, EPSY) – Research Scientist, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Graduated Dec., 2012)

Jinhee Choo (PhD, EPSY) – Adjunct Instructor, University of Illinois (Graduated May, 2012)

Cassie Palmer (PhD, EPSY) – Assistant Professor, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Denver, CO (Graduated May, 2015)

Heather Mauch (MS, EPSY) – Technical writer, Livermore Labs, Livermore, CA (Graduated May, 2015)

Yeon Seon Lim (PhD, EPSY) – (Graduated August, 2015)

Nikos Vergis (PhD, LING) – Lecturer, University of Crete, Greece

Peiyun Zhou (PhD, EPSY) – Research Scientist, Google (Graduated August, 2017)

Zhiying Qian (PhD, EALC) – Associate Professor (with tenure), Linguistics, Florida State University (Graduated May, 2015)

Nayoung Kim (PhD, EPSY) – Director of Program Planning, Implementation and Assessment for the East Carolina University School of Dental Medicine (Graduated May, 2019)

Anna Tsiola (PhD, LING) – UX Designer & Researcher, Meta (Graduated July, 2021)

Maria Goldshtein (PhD, LING) – Research Scientist, Arizona State University (Graduated July, 2021)

Sarah-Elizabeth Deshaies (PhD, EPSY) – (Graduated May, 2022)

Jack Dempsey (MS, PhD, EPSY) – Director of Research, Cascade Reading (Graduated May, 2022)

Victoria Susberry (MS, PhD, EPSY) – Teacher, Chicago Public Schools (Graduated May, 2023)

Marian Pan (PhD, EPSY) – Data Analyst, Geis College of Business, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (Graduated, May 16, 2024)

Laura Valderrama (PhD, EPSY) – Deceased, June 27, 2024

Former Assistants

Michael Blasingame, Ellie Brindise, Hye Yoon Choi, Jules Dubin, Kyle Hartzell, Eric Juul, Mary Keutemeyer, Rachel Leddy, Austin Maske, Hye-min Mia Lee, Jooyun Lee, Yojin Park, Adina Raizen, Laeh Ragans, Aubrey Sumaydeng, Joy Shapley, Allie Stanko, Heather, Sulikowski, Kate Tyndall, Youjia Wang, Zongyuan Wang, Cassandra Phelps, Shaolingyun Guo, Mary Fran Donovan, Yilan Liu, Mien-Jen Wu