Iris Berent

Professor
Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh '93
Research Area: Cognitive

Contact Information:
Office: 209 Behavioral Science
Telephone: (561) 297-2905
Fax: (561) 297-2160
E-mail: iberent@fau.edu

General Research Interests

My research examines the interaction between reading ability and linguistic competence. I seek experimental evidence for formal accounts of phonological and morphological representations proposed by generative linguistics. My work examines the nature of linguistic competence and its origins: Is linguistic knowledge fully explicable by the statistical properties of linguistic experience and domain-general cognition, or is linguistic knowledge constrained (in part) by innate principles that are language specific? The conclusions regarding the structure of phonological representations are next interpreted to address the nature of reading skill. There is much evidence demonstrating that phonological processes play a central role in skilled reading, whereas dyslexia is frequently linked to a hereditary deficit to the phonological processing of spoken language. My research examines whether such phonological processes are constrained on-line by the phonological component of the grammar. This work illuminates the role of linguistic competence in reading skill.

Representative Publications

Berent, I., Steriade, D., Lennertz, T & Vaknin, V. (2007). What we know about what we have never heard: Evidence from perceptual illusions. Cognition, 104, 591-630.

Berent, I., Vaknin, V., & Marcus. G. (2007). Roots, stems, and the universality of lexical representations: Evidence from Hebrew. Cognition, 104, 254-286.

Berent, I., Lennertz, T., Jun, J., Moreno, M., A., & Smolensky, P. (2008). Language universals in human brains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 5321-5325. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0801469105v1

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