CELIA M. KLINAssociate Professor of Psychology
Ph.D., University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Area: Cognitive Psychology
E-mail: cklin@binghamton.edu
Phone: 607-777-4991
Office: Science IV, Room 212
Research Interests:psycholinguistics, reading, comprehension and memory for text
Center for Cognitive and Psycholinguistic Sciences (CAPS)
Few things are as fascinating, or as important, in people's lives as language. Language plays a central role in almost all aspects of our lives. And psycholinguistics involves the psychological study of language. In my laboratory, we examine the cognitive processes that are involved in using and understanding language. More specifically, we examine the processes involved in understanding written language. Because language almost always involves units of language larger than an individual word or a single sentence, we focus on how people understand connected discourse, such as stories. In this work, we ask questions such as: What is the nature of the "memory representation" that readers create? That is, after reading a story (or an email or an essay) what information does the reader have stored in memory? And what are the cognitive processes involved in comprehension? In addition to contributing toward a theory of discourse, or text, processing, this work contributes to the study of a variety of basic cognitive processes such as memory and attention.
Some recent topics of investigation in my lab: How skilled are readers at keeping track of story characters' perspective? What types of inferences do readers draw? How do readers represent the spatial information in stories? How does a change in context influence readers' memory for a story?
(* indicates student co-author)
*Weingartner, K. M., & Klin, C. M. (2005). Perspective-taking during reading: An on-line investigation of the illusory transparency of intention. Memory & Cognition, 333, 48-58.
Klin, C. M., *Guzmán, A. E. *Weingartner, K. M. & *Ralano, A. S. (2006). When anaphor resolution fails: Partial encoding of anaphoric inferences. Journal of Memory & Language, 54, 131-143.
*Weingartner, K. M., *Ralano, A. S., and Klin, C. M. (2007). Rereading ambiguous phrases across unrelated texts: Evidence for context-dependent repetition effects. Memory & Cognition.
*Weingartner, K. M. & Klin, C. M. (under revision). Assessing what story characters know: The processes involved in linguistic perspective taking. Scientific Studies of Reading.
Klin, C. M., *Ralano, A. S. & *Drumm, A. M. (under review) Repetition effects across unrelated narratives.
