EVENT: Psychology Colloquium: Prof Anne Castles (Macquarie): Putting the learning into orthographic learning

Presenter: Prof Anne Castles (Macquarie)

Anne Castles is Distinguised Professor of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, and Deputy Director and Leader of the Reading Program of the ARC Centre of Excellence in cognition and its Disorders. Her research focuses on variability within the reading-impaired population, and in the causes of different types of dyslexia, including genetic, perceptual and language factors. She is also interested in the process of normal reading development and in particular in the mechanism by which word recognition skills are acquired by children learning to read. she is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA)and serves on the Editorial Boards of several journals including Cortex, Cognitive Neuropsychology and the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. she is also Chair of the Steering Committee of the NSW Centre for Effective Reading and a member of the Council of Learning Difficulties Australia.

Title: Putting the learning into orthographic learning.

ABSTRACT:

It is widely accepted that becoming a skilled word reader has its underpinnings in strong alphabetic decoding skills. However, this is not the whole story: beginning readers must ultimately move from having a reading system that is heavily reliant on alphabetic decoding to one that recognise words rapidly via access to rich, high quality lexical representations. In this talk, I will discuss recent work exploring this complex orthographic learning process, focussing in detail on research that has attempted to stimulate and model learning as it takes place. I will conclude with some suggestions for future research directions in exploring the key transition from novice to expert word reader.