About Us | Educational Psychology Psycholinguistics Lab - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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.

Former Graduate Students

Heeyoun Cho (Full-time Lecturer, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea)

Jack Dempsey (Director of Research, Cascade Reading)

Sarah-Elizabeth Deshaies

Maria Goldshtein (Postdoctoral Research Scientist, Arizona State University)

Erika Hussey (Cognitive Science Team at US Army Natick Soldier Research, Development, and Engineering Center (NSRDEC)

Ji Hyon Kim (Associate Professor and Chair, School of English for Translation and Interpretation, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, South Korea)

Sun-A Kim (Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Jung Hyun Lim ()

Kent Lee (Associate Professor, Center for Teaching and Learning, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea)

Steven Luke (Professor, Psychology Department, Brigham Young University)

Heather Mauch (Technical Writer, Livermore Labs)

Jinhee Choo

Cassie Palmer (Counselor, Veterans’ Administration)

Jeong-Ah Shin (Professor, Dongkuk University, Seoul, South Korea)

Kacey Wochna (Lecturer, University of Michigan)

Anastasia Stoops (Post-Doc, Department of Psychology and NCSA, University of Illinois)

Anna Tsiola (Research Scientist, Meta)

Nikos Vergis ()

Peiyun Zhou (Research Scientist, Alphabet)

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