Donald Shankweiler
Encyclopedia
Donald P. Shankweiler http://web.uconn.edu/psychology/Faculty/Shankweiler/Shankweiler.html http://www.haskins.yale.edu/staff/shankweiler.html is an eminent psychologist
and cognitive scientist
who has done pioneering work on the representation and processing of language
in the brain
. He is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Connecticut
, a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories
in New Haven, Connecticut
, and a member of the Board of Directorshttp://www.haskins.yale.edu/board.html at Haskins.
, reading, and cognitive neuroscience
. His main interests have been studying the acquisition of reading and writing
, understanding disorders of reading, writing, and spoken language, and exploring the representation of spoken and written language in the brain. In the 1960s, Shankweiler and Michael Studdert-Kennedy
used a dichotic listening
technique (presenting different nonsense syllables simultaneously to opposite ears) to demonstrate the dissociation of phonetic (speech) and auditory (nonspeech) perception by finding that phonetic structure devoid of meaning is an integral part of language, typically processed in the left cerebral hemisphere
. Alvin Liberman
, Franklin S. Cooper
, Shankweiler, and Studdert-Kennedy summarized and interpreted fifteen years of research in a paper "Perception of the Speech Code," that argued for the motor theory of speech perception
. This is still among the most cited papers in the speech literature. It set the agenda for many years of research at Haskins and elsewhere by describing speech as a code in which speakers overlap (or coarticulate
) segments to form syllables.
, identifies sources of reading-related comprehension difficulties that are most subject to individual differences, and studies their cognitive
and neurobiological underpinnings. This novel project brings together the knowledge base on reading differences and advanced psycholinguistic methods for studying on-line sentence processing, including tracking eye movements
during reading and tracking brain activity (using fMRI) during coordinated reading and listening tasks.
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
and cognitive scientist
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
who has done pioneering work on the representation and processing of language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
in the brain
Brain
The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals—only a few primitive invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, sea squirts and starfishes do not have one. It is located in the head, usually close to primary sensory apparatus such as vision, hearing,...
. He is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Connecticut
University of Connecticut
The admission rate to the University of Connecticut is about 50% and has been steadily decreasing, with about 28,000 prospective students applying for admission to the freshman class in recent years. Approximately 40,000 prospective students tour the main campus in Storrs annually...
, a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories
Haskins Laboratories
Haskins Laboratories is an independent, international, multidisciplinary community of researchers conducting basic research on spoken and written language. Founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut since 1970, Haskins Laboratories is a private, non-profit research institute with a...
in New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...
, and a member of the Board of Directorshttp://www.haskins.yale.edu/board.html at Haskins.
Career
Donald Shankweiler's research career has spanned a number of areas related speech perceptionSpeech perception
Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology...
, reading, and cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain...
. His main interests have been studying the acquisition of reading and writing
Writing
Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
, understanding disorders of reading, writing, and spoken language, and exploring the representation of spoken and written language in the brain. In the 1960s, Shankweiler and Michael Studdert-Kennedy
Michael Studdert-Kennedy
Michael Studdert-Kennedy is an eminent psychologist and speech scientist. He is well known for his contributions to studies of speech perception, the motor theory of speech perception, and the evolution of language, among other areas. He is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of...
used a dichotic listening
Dichotic listening
In cognitive psychology, dichotic listening is a procedure commonly used to investigate selective attention in the auditory system. In dichotic listening, two different auditory stimuli are presented to the participant simultaneously, one to each ear, normally using a set of headphones...
technique (presenting different nonsense syllables simultaneously to opposite ears) to demonstrate the dissociation of phonetic (speech) and auditory (nonspeech) perception by finding that phonetic structure devoid of meaning is an integral part of language, typically processed in the left cerebral hemisphere
Cerebral hemisphere
A cerebral hemisphere is one of the two regions of the eutherian brain that are delineated by the median plane, . The brain can thus be described as being divided into left and right cerebral hemispheres. Each of these hemispheres has an outer layer of grey matter called the cerebral cortex that is...
. Alvin Liberman
Alvin Liberman
Alvin Meyer Liberman was an American psychologist whose ideas set the agenda for fifty years of research in the psychology of speech perception and laid the groundwork for modern computer speech synthesis and the understanding of critical issues in cognitive science...
, Franklin S. Cooper
Franklin S. Cooper
Franklin Seaney Cooper was an American physicist and inventor who was a pioneer in speech research.-Biography:...
, Shankweiler, and Studdert-Kennedy summarized and interpreted fifteen years of research in a paper "Perception of the Speech Code," that argued for the motor theory of speech perception
Motor theory of speech perception
thumb|250px|right|When we hear [[speech|spoken words]] we sense that they are made of auditory [[sound]]s. The motor theory of speech perception argues that behind the sounds we hear are the intended movements of the [[vocal tract]] that [[pronunciation|pronounces]] them.The motor theory of speech...
. This is still among the most cited papers in the speech literature. It set the agenda for many years of research at Haskins and elsewhere by describing speech as a code in which speakers overlap (or coarticulate
Coarticulation
Coarticulation in its general sense refers to a situation in which a conceptually isolated speech sound is influenced by, and becomes more like, a preceding or following speech sound...
) segments to form syllables.
Current work
Shankweiler's current workhttp://www.haskins.yale.edu/research/a108research.html, done in conjunction with Dave Brazehttp://www.haskins.yale.edu/staff/braze.html and other colleagues at Haskins LaboratoriesHaskins Laboratories
Haskins Laboratories is an independent, international, multidisciplinary community of researchers conducting basic research on spoken and written language. Founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut since 1970, Haskins Laboratories is a private, non-profit research institute with a...
, identifies sources of reading-related comprehension difficulties that are most subject to individual differences, and studies their cognitive
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
and neurobiological underpinnings. This novel project brings together the knowledge base on reading differences and advanced psycholinguistic methods for studying on-line sentence processing, including tracking eye movements
Eye tracking
Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze or the motion of an eye relative to the head. An eye tracker is a device for measuring eye positions and eye movement. Eye trackers are used in research on the visual system, in psychology, in cognitive linguistics and in product...
during reading and tracking brain activity (using fMRI) during coordinated reading and listening tasks.
Representative Publications
- Shankweiler, D. P., & Harris, K. S. (1966). An experimental approach to the problem of articulation in aphasia. Cortex, 2, 277-292.
- Shankweiler, D., & Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1967). Identification of consonants and vowels presented to the left and right ears. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 19, 59-63.
- A. M. Liberman, F. S. Cooper, D. S. Shankweiler, and M. Studdert-Kennedy. Perception of the speech code. (1967). Psychological Review, 74, 1967, 431-461.
- Studdert-Kennedy, M., & Shankweiler, D. P. (1970). Hemispheric specialization for speech perception. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 48, 579-594.
- Studdert-Kennedy, M., Shankweiler, D., & Schulman, S. (1970). Opposed effects of a delayed channel on perception of dichotically and monotically presented CV syllables. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 48, 599-602.
- Shankweiler, D. & Liberman, I.Y. (1972). Misreading: A search for causes.In Kavanagh, James F. & Mattingly, Ignatius G.(eds.) Language by ear and by eye; the relationships between speech and reading. (pp.293-317). Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.
- Studdert-Kennedy, M., Shankweiler, D., & Pisoni, D. (1972). Auditory and phonetic processes in speech perception: Evidence from a dichotic study. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2, 455-466.
- Shankweiler, D., & Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1975). A continuum of lateralization for speech perception? Brain and Language, 2, 212-225
- Shankweiler, D., & Crain, S. (1986) Language mechanisms and reading disorder: A modular approach. Cognition, 24, 139-168.
- Lukatela, K., Shankweiler, D., & Crain, S. (1995). Syntactic processwing in agrammatic aphasia by speakers of a Slavic language. Brain and Language, 19, 50-76.
- Shankweiler, D., Crain, S., Katz, L., Fowler, A., Liberman, A. M., Brady, S., Thornton, R., Lundquist, E., Dreyer, L., Fletcher, J. Steubing, K., Shaywitz, S. E., & Shaywitz, B. (1995). Cognitive profiles of reading-disabled children: Comparison of language skills in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Psychological Science, 6, 149-156.
- Shankweiler, D., Lundquist, E., Katz, L., Steubing, K., Fletcher, J., Brady, S., Fowler, A., Dreyer, L., Marchione, K., Shaywitz, S., & Shaywitz, B. (1999). Comprehension and decoding: Patterns of association in children with reading difficulties. Scientific Studies of Reading, 3, 95-112.
- Shankweiler, D. (1999). Words to meanings. Scientific Studies of Reading, 3, 113-127.
- Ni, W., Constable, R. T., Mencl, W. E., Pugh, K., Fulbright, R., Shaywitz, S., Shaywitz, B., Gore, J. & Shankweiler, D. (2000). An event-related neuroimaging study distinguishing form and content in sentence processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12, 120-133.
- Pugh, K., Mencl, E.W., Shaywitz, B. A., Shaywitz, S. E., Fulbright, R. K., Skudlarski, P., Constable, R. T., Marchione, K., Jenner A. R., Shankweiler, D. P., Katz, L., Fletcher, J., Lacadie, C., & Gore, J. C. (2000). The angular gyrus in developmental dyslexia: Task-specific differences in functional connectivity in posterior cortex, Psychological Science, 11, 51-56.
- Crain, S., Ni, W., & Shankweiler, D. (2001). Grammatism. Brain and Language, 77, 294-304.
- Braze, D., Shankweiler, D.P., Ni, W., & Palumbo, L.C. (2002). Reader's eye movements distinguish anomalies of form and content. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 31, 25-44.
- Constable, R.T., Pugh, K. R., Berroya, E., Mancl, W. E., Westerveld, M., Ni, W., & Shankweiler, D. (2004). Sentence complexity and input modality effects in sentence comprehension: An fMRI study. NeuroImage, 22, 11-21.
- Shankweiler, D., Palumbo, L. C., Ni, W., Mencl, W. E., Fulbright, R., Pugh, K. R., Constable, R. T., Harris, K.S., Kollia, B., & Van Dyke, J. (2004). Unexpected recovery of language function after massive left-hemisphere infarct: Coordinated psycholinguistic and neuroimaging studies. Brain and Language, 91, 181-182.
- Shankweiler, D. & Fowler, A. E. (2004). Questions people ask about the role of phonological processes in learning to read. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 17, 483-515.
- Fletcher-Flinn, C. M.., Shankweiler, D., & Frost, S. J. (2004). Coordination of reading and spelling in early literacy: An examination of the discrepancy hypothesis. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 17, 617-644.
- Byrne, B., Shankweiler, D., & Hine, D.W. (in press). Reading development of children at risk for dyslexia. To appear in M. Mody & K. Silliman (Eds.), Language impairment and reading disability: Interactions among brain, behavior, and experience. New York: Guilford.
- Braze, D., Tabor, W., Shankweiler, D. P., & Mencl, W. E. (in press). Speaking up for Vocabulary: Reading Skill Differences in Young Adults. Journal of Learning Disabilities.
- LeVasseur, V., Macaruso, P., Palumbo, L., & Shankweiler, D. (2006). Syntactically cued text facilitates oral reading fluency in developing readers. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 423-445.