Mark S. Seidenberg

Back to the Listing | Psychology Home

Mark S. Seidenberg

Psychology 534
608-263-2553

Columbia, 1980, Ph.D.

Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

The research in my lab is concerned with basic questions about the nature of language and how it is acquired, used, and represented in the brain. Much of this research has been concerned with reading, a particular use of language, how reading skill is acquired by children, and forms of dyslexia that occur developmentally or in adults as a consequence of neuropathology. This research involves both behavioral studies and the development of large-scale computational ("neural network") models of normal and disordered language. The theoretical framework that was originally developed in connection with reading is being applied to many other aspects of language, including phonology, morphology and lexical semantics, and its implications concerning the brain bases of language are beginning to be studied using neuroimaging. The goal of the research is to understand the use of language and its brain bases using computational models as the theoretical interface between the two.

Representative Publications

Rayner, K., Foorman, B.R., Perfetti, E., Pesetsky, D., & Seidenberg, Mark S. (2001). How psychological science informs the teaching of reading. Psychological Science in the Public Interest Monograph, 2, 31-74. American Psychological Society.

Joanisse, M., Manis, F., Keating, P., & Seidenberg, M.S. (2000). Language deficits in dyslexia: Speech perception, phonology, and morphology. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 77, 30-60.

Joanisse, M., & Seidenberg, M.S. (1999). Impairments in verb morphology following brain injury: A connectionist model. Proc. of the National Academy of Sciences. 96, 7592-7597.

Harm, M., & Seidenberg, M.S. (1999). Reading acquisition, phonology, and dyslexia: Insights from a connectionist model. Psychological Review, 106, 491-528.

Seidenberg, M.S. (1997). Language acquisition and use: Learning and applying probabilistic constraints. Science, 275, 1599-1604.

Seidenberg, M.S., & Gonnerman, L. (2000). Explaining derivational morphology as the convergence of codes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 353-361.

Seidenberg, M.S., & MacDonald, M.C. (1999). A probabilistic constraints approach to language acquisition and processing. Cognitive Science. 23, 569-588.