My enthusiasm for neuroimaging research was stoked by my PhD research at Texas A&M University, where, under the mentoring of Dr. Jyotsna Vaid (
link), I studied the influence of orthography on processing word morphology in Hindi versus Urdu. I also looked at the hemispheric lateralization of morphological processing in Hindi and Urdu.
[The morphology of
a word refers to its structure and origins. For example, TALKED, TALKING and
TALKATIVE are all morphological forms of the root word TALK. For five decades, researchers have
been trying to establish whether information about word morphology is
distinctly stored in the mental lexicon (internal
dictionary) of readers, or if they are able to derive this information based
simply on the sound (phonology), visual form (orthography) and meaning (semantics) similarities among morphologically related
words. The evidence so far is inconclusive.
Some experiments seem to suggest
that readers are attuned to the degree of similarity of sound, spelling and
meaning in morphologically related words -- for example, seeing the word
TEACHER just before being asked to read TEACH aloud usually leads people to
respond faster, whereas seeing TAUGHT does not (Masson & Isaak, 1999;
Stanners et al., 1979). One group of researchers therefore argues that
morphology is not independently represented, but simply inferred on the basis of similar sound, spelling and/or meaning. On the other hand, readers can be "tricked," into
responding faster to target words that only appear to be morphologically related to the previous
word, as in the case of SURGERY - SURGE (Longtin et al., 2003; Rastle et al.,
2004). Such findings lead another group of researchers to think that the
cognitive processor must be specifically programmed to extract morphological
information while a reader accesses his/her mental lexicon.
I used the language pair of Hindi and Urdu to study the influence of orthography (script + spelling rules) on readers' sensitivity to morphological relationships, and found that when presented with the very same words, such as the earlier example of TEACHER - TEACH, bilingual readers seemed to respond to the morphological relationship differently in the distinctly different orthographies of Hindi (पानी pronounced /pa:ni:/ means WATER) and Urdu (/pa:ni:/ in Urdu is written پانی).]
Going back further, my interest in bilingualism and multilingualism arose out of my experiences studying reading and spelling acquisition among children learning Kannada and English simultaneously, as part of the work on my first PhD under the guidance of Dr. Prakash Padakannaya of the University of Mysore (
link).
[Children across India are typically taught simultaneously to read and write in two or even three different languages. The comparison of their reading and spelling errors in each language offers rich insights into the development of their knowledge of the principles of mapping letters to sounds in each language, as well as the strategies they use to tackle the difficult task of reading. My own work compared reading and spelling errors made by children in their native language, Kannada, against their second language, English.
The data showed that although in general, children appeared to be more accurate at reading Kannada compared to English words of comparable length and syllable structure, their reading and spelling errors in Kannada reflected confusion due to the larger number of letters or akṣaras to be mastered in Kannada, as well as the visual similarity among many akṣaras. By comparison, children found the sound-to-spelling mapping more confusing in English, due to the higher variability in letter-sound correspondence in English. For example, children might confuse ಮರ (pronounced /mʌrʌ/, meaning TREE) for ವರ (pronounced /vʌrʌ/, meaning BOON), owing to the visual similarity between ಮ and ವ, whereas in English, they might pronounce COLD with a soft 'c' (i.e., SOLD).]
For a more complete picture of my research and general academic background, please refer to my
curriculum vitae.
