University Hawaiʻi at Hilo

Speaker: Dr. Jeremy Purcell from University of Maryland.
Current Role: Applying for Assistant Professor in Psychology Department.
Initial Interests: Brain basis of reading developed during grad school; later expanded to spelling and aspects of written language.

Literacy Statistics in the U.S.: 20% of adults are illiterate; 54% possess literacy below sixth-grade level.
Geographic Distribution: Low literacy often found in southern states and areas with high immigrant populations.
Socioeconomic Impact: Low literacy correlates with reduced productivity and increased social service costs, fostering generational poverty.
Cognitive and Emotional Benefits: Literacy improves cognitive and emotional well-being, providing insights into the world and oneself.

Visual Expertise and Distinction: Visual stimuli studied include faces and words, as these require high levels of visual expertise.
Cultural Evolution of Written Language: Written language is a relatively new development, evolving to suit human cognitive capabilities.

Basic Processing Framework: Information from the written word can be mapped to long-term memory or processed through grapheme-phoneme conversion.
- Grapheme: A fundamental unit of a written language.
- Phoneme: A fundamental unit of sound in speech.
Spelling Processes: Involves converting spoken words into written form through similar systems, emphasizing grapheme-phoneme relationships.
Subliteracy Tool: Novel Corpus-Based Measure
- Focus on exploring regularities in written language to assess how language is encoded in memories.

Multilingualism Effects: Investigate how being multilingual influences reading ability and literacy rates.
Pseudoword Spelling Tasks: Emerging research investigates how pseudowords, or words without established meanings, relate to spelling skills and literacy diagnostics.

Experimental Design: Extracts empirical regularities from a lexicon to facilitate understanding of phonological and spelling mappings.
Measures Consistency: Evaluates the frequency and probability of graphemes and phonemes in context to written language.
Combining Units for Analysis: Focuses not just on smaller units but larger syllabic units for achieving better understandings of spelling and reading behaviors.

Pseudoword Performance: Shows how pseudoword spelling can reveal insights into individuals' written language encoding and literacy skills, including their tendency to spell consistently or creatively.
Encodes Word Associations: Utilizes frequency measures to establish relationships between literacy skills and spelling performance, highlighting better knowledge of phoneme-grapheme mappings.

Ongoing Studies: Led by a large team focusing on behavioral data and fMRI to explore cognitive aspects of written language.
Preliminary Insights: Participants with higher skills exhibited more consistent spelling patterns, with lower literacy participants showing greater variability in spelling responses.
Neural Differentiation in fMRI: Techniques developed to analyze variations in neural activation patterns linked to experience levels with writing.

Integrating Multivariate Analyses: Investigate how different unit sizes in writing relate to overall literacy skills across different populations, including multilingual individuals.
Examining Neural Differentiation: Focus on how well-formed neural representations correlate with reading skills and the significance of such measurements in future literacy diagnostics.

Research Significance: Dr. Purcell's work aims to deepen the understanding of how literacy and written language systems operate cognitively and neurobiologically, with aims for practical applications in education and diagnostics for literacy interventions.