SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD

The Scientific Advisory Board is a panel of leading experts on the science of reading. The Board is an interdisciplinary resource for LTI on current developments in reading, education, and literacy with expertise in cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, educational psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and second language learning.

Thomas G. Bever, Chair

Thomas G. Bever is a Professor at the University of Arizona in the Departments of Linguistics, Psychology, and Language, Reading, and Culture and also a faculty member of the Cognitive Science Program, and Program in Neuroscience, and the Second Language and Teaching Program.

He is the former Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona, Founder and Director of the Center for the Sciences of Language at the University of Rochester, and held previous appointments at Columbia University and The Rockefeller University.

His theoretical and applied research is published in over 140 articles and books on wide variety of topics including the bases for cerebral asymmetries in humans and animals, the nature of adult performance systems, the fundamental laws of learning abstract systems in humans and animals, individual differences in cognitive processes (e.g., based on gender or handedness), and the nature of visual computational processes that comprise the evolved biological substrate for language.

He is the co-founder of the journal Cognition, co-author of Sentence Comprehension, and co-inventor of several issued and pending patents.

Kenneth S. Goodman

Kenneth S. Goodman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Language, Reading and Culture in the College of Education at the University of Arizona.

He is best known for developing his comprehensive theory of the reading process and his contribution to the literacy philosophy movement called whole language learning. He is past-president of the International Reading Association, the Center for Expansion of Language and Thinking, and the National Conference on Research in English and Literacy. He has published over 200 articles and book chapters. His recent books include On the Revolution of Reading: The Selected Writings of Kenneth S. Goodman (2003), Saving Our Schools: The Case for Public Education – Saying No To “No Child Left Behind” (Ed. with Yetta Goodman, Patrick Shannon, and Roger Rapoport, 2004), What’s Whole in Whole Language (20th Anniversary Edition, 2005), and The Truth About DIBELS: What It Is, What It Does (2006).

He was elected to the Reading Hall of Fame. Among awards he has recieved is the Distinguished Researcher Award from the National Council on Research in Language and Literacy and James Squire Lifetime Achievement award from the National Council of Teachers of English.

Yetta M. Goodman

Yetta M. Goodman is Regents Professor Emerita in the Department of Language, Reading and Culture in the College of Education at the University of Arizona, where in addition to working with doctoral students, she also directs the Eye Movement Miscue Analysis Lab.

She consults with education departments and speaks at conferences throughout the United States and in many nations of the world regarding issues of language, teaching and learning with implications for language arts curricula.

In addition to her research in early literacy, miscue analysis and in exploring reading and writing processes, she has popularized the term kidwatching encouraging teachers to be professional observers of the language and learning development of their students. She is a major spokesperson for whole language and in her extensive writing shows concern for educational issues and research with a focus on classrooms, students and teachers.

Charles A. Perfetti

Charles A. Perfetti is Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Director of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

His research on reading and language is published in over 180 articles and book chapters. He is author of two books on reading (Reading Ability, 1985; Text-based learning and Reasoning: Studies in History, 1995, with M.A. Britt and M. Georgi) and co-editor of four books on literacy topics, most recently, Higher level language processes in the brain: Inference and comprehension processes (with Franz Schmalhofer).

He is the 2004 recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading. Perfetti is Co-Director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, funded by the National Science Foundation. His current research program addresses the nature of reading skill, the role of word knowledge in comprehension, comparative studies of reading across writing systems, and second language learning. The research spans studies of adults and children and uses behavioral, electrophysiological (ERPs), and fMRI methods.

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has also taught at Stanford and MIT.

His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the American Psychological Association. He has also received six honorary doctorates, several teaching awards, and numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He is currently Honorary President of the Canadian Psychological Association and Chair on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for The New Republic, The New York Times, and other publications.

He has been named Humanist of the Year, and is listed in Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine's “The World's Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and in Time magazine's “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” His latest book is The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

Keith Rayner

Keith Rayner is the Atkinson Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to moving to UCSD in 2008, he was Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was at UMass for thirty years, and prior to that at the University of Rochester for five years.

He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1974. Professor Rayner has research interests related to reading, language processing, scene perception, and visual search. He is an expert on the use of eye movements to study cognitive processes and developed a number of gaze-contingent paradigms to study reading and other information processing tasks. His research has been continually funded by NIH since 1974 (including a MERIT award).

He is currently the Editor of Psychological Review, and was previously Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. He is the author (with Alexander Pollatsek) of The Psychology of Reading (1989; currently being revised) and the Editor of five other books (all on some aspect of reading).

Mark S. Seidenberg

Mark S. Seidenberg is Hilldale Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor in the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin.

He is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies language, reading and dyslexia. At Columbia, where he did his undergraduate and graduate work, he was a student of Tom Bever and lived for a while with Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was being taught sign language and mostly talked about food, a shared interest. He has had academic appointments at McGill University in Montreal and the University of Southern California. He has published over a hundred scientific articles and was recently honored as one of the 250 most-cited researchers in the areas of psychology and psychiatry.

His reading research addresses the nature of skilled reading, how children learn to read, dyslexia, and the brain bases of reading, using the tools of modern cognitive neuroscience: behavioral experiments, computational models, and neuroimaging. His language research addresses what people know when they know a language, how this knowledge is represented in the brain, and how it is acquired and used.

Christopher D. Nicholas, Coordinator

Christopher D. Nicholas is the Director of Development at Language Technologies, Inc. where he applies science to create and test new technologies to improve the legibility and readability of text. He graduated from the Campus Honors Program with bachelor of science degrees in biology and psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Arizona. His research includes study of the molecular genetics of plant pigmentation, the role of the cerebral hemispheres and interhemispheric communication in letter and word perception, and the empirical aesthetics of visual-form perception. He is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona where he co-instructs a course on the psycholinguistics of writing systems. He is co-inventor of several pending patents on typesetting technology.

For more information contact us at:
info@readsmart.com, or (520) 795-8100.