Alumni

Janine McGloin - Speech Pathologist and Research Assistant
I am a speech pathologist currently working as lead research assistant on the project with Dr Joanne Arciuli at the University of Sydney. I have been collecting data on visual statistical learning, vocabulary, linguistic stress, and reading accuracy and comprehension with adults. I will soon be going into state and catholic schools using similar experiments to collect normative data with children aged 5 to 12years, and language impaired children in the Communication Disorders Treatment and Research Centre. The study will contribute to the understanding of the development and application of linguistic stress, and in the long term to assessment tools and intervention strategies, curriculum planning and teaching approaches. I enjoy being part of the project team. I have a particular interest in literacy and learning, and have previously worked on the word learning in children project also at the University of Sydney.

Dr Ian Simpson - Postdoctoral Fellow
I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Discipline of Speech Pathology. In a former life I was a computer programmer and my role in the Psycholinguistics Laboratory is to create programs for the various experiments being run, along with analysis tools to process the data. These are usually written in a combination of e-Prime and visual basic.

Tim Tooke - Research Assistant
I am currently in my third year of a Bachelor of Speech and Hearing Sciences at Macquarie University. I hope to continue studying toward a Masters of Speech and Language Pathology. In particular I am interested in acquired speech and language disorders resulting from head injuries and the resulting intervention strategies. Currently, I am also a research assistant examining stress assignment with Dr Arciuli. My job involves going into primary schools and collecting a range of data using several tasks involving reading, nonword decoding, picture description and implicit learning. In my spare time I am interested in running, spending time with family and friends, travelling in Australia and overseas and foreign language learning.

Joanne Lindelauf - Research Assistant
Joanne works as a research assistant on Dr Arciuli’s research study "To Stress or Not to Stress: A Cross-linguistic Investigation of Lexical Stress Using Corpus Analyses, Behavioural Testing and Computational Modelling". She also works as a primary school teacher and is studying psychology through Charles Sturt University’s distance education program.

Alessio Barsaglini - International Visiting Researcher
I am a Clinical Psychologist from the University Degli Studi di Padova, situated in Padua, in northern Italy. I am visiting Australia until June to carry out research into "the linguistic markers of deception in Italian speakers". This work is being carried out in collaboration with Dr Joanne Arciuli, in the Faculty of Health Sciences.
I will be recruiting participants from the Italian speaking community residing in Australia. The study will contribute to the understanding of the linguistic processes and features characterising lying versus truth telling.

Berna Gurisik - Honours Student
I am currently undertaking an honours thesis under the supervision of Joanne Arciuli and Natalie Munro to investigate auditory processing abilities in children with SLI via a Dichotic Listening task. We are also interested to explore how these results may or may not correlate with their reading rate, accuracy and comprehension and other skills such as statistical learning. Auditory processing difficulties and reading difficulties are quite frequently reported in this population however little research has been conducted to explore the extent of the relationship between the two. It is hoped that by conducting this research, we will gain a greater understanding of language processing in SLI in the hope that it will influence future intervention approaches. Another area of clinical interest is that of neurological speech disorders. Aphasia is a particular interest and in the future I would like to conduct a study to extend our knowledge in the treatment of aphasia and how we can go about improving social re-integration of this population.

Kirsten Stokes - Honours Student
Hi, my name is Kirsten Stokes. I am an honours student in the Discipline of Speech Pathology at the University of Sydney. The research I am undertaking investigates the relationship between auditory discrimination and reading abilities of primary school aged children with Autism. I am researching this in order to gain greater understanding of specific aspects of cognitive function and its role in literacy development. I am hoping that these results will assist those working on literacy with children with Autism. I am also interested in working with adults and other specific populations, such as those with a stutter and disability populations. As I am still learning I am yet to decide the area in which I enjoy working in most! There are so many options!