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Greg B. Simpson

Professor
Cognitive Psychology

Ph.D., 1979, University of Kansas
Research Areas: Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology

gsimpson@ku.edu

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). 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). Our current research investigates how semantics and word morphology interact, examining how compound words activate their constituents and words related to those constituents.

Selected Publications

Lee, C., Simpson, G.B., & Kim, Y. (Eds.) (2009). Handbook of East Asian psycholinguistics: Volume III, Korean. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Simpson, G.B., & Kang, H. (2009). Lexical and sublexical processes in Korean word recognition. In C. Lee, G.B. Simpson, & Y. Kim, & G. (Eds.). Handbook of East Asian psycholinguistics: Volume III, Korean. (pp. 418-422). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Simpson, G.B., & Kang, H. (2006). Developmental, cross-linguistic perspectives on visual word recognition. Language and Speech, 49, 55-73.

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.

Simpson, G.B., & Kang, H. (2004). Syllable processing in alphabetic Korean. Reading and Writing, 17, 137-151.

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.