Greg B. Simpson

Related Links
Cognitive Psychology Program

Research Interests
When we read, marks on a page are rapidly and automatically translated into ideas in the mind. My students and I are trying to understand the psychological pathway that exists between these beginning and ending states. We have explored several aspects of people’s word-recognition processes, including the effects of context on processing the meanings of ambiguous words and the role of phonology in word recognition. We have examined word recognition developmentally (comparing beginning and adult readers) and in two languages (English and Korean). Our recent research has examined the interaction of semantic and phonological variables in word recognition, by investigating processing as a function of a word’s “neighborhoods” (i.e., the number of words that share orthographic, phonological, or semantic information with a target word).

Selected Publications
Simpson, G.B., & Kang, H. (In press). Developmental, cross-linguistic perspectives on visual word recognition. Brain and Language.

Yates, M., Locker, L. Jr., & Simpson, G.B., (2004). The influence of phonological neighborhood on visual word perception. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 11, 452-457.

Locker, L.Jr., Simpson, G.B., & Yates, M. (2003). Semantic neighborhood effects on the recognition of polysemous words. Memory & Cognition, 31, 505-515.

Yates, M., Locker, L. Jr., & Simpson, G.B. (2003). Semantic and phonological influences on the processing of words and pseudohomophones. Memory & Cognition, 31, 856-866.

Kang, H., & Simpson, G.B. (2001). Local strategic control of information in visual word recognition. Memory & Cognition, 29, 648-655.

Simpson, G.B., & Adamopoulos, A.C. (2001). Repeated homographs in word and sentence contexts: Multiple processing of multiple meanings. In D.S. Gorfein (Ed.), On the consequences of meaning selection (pp. 105-117). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.