I and my colleagues from the Florida Center for Reading Research recently returned from a trip to Rotterdam, The Netherlands for the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading. The city is a wonderfully international place and the hosts picked a really enriching location, with so much in the way of street life and culture around the meeting center. I am particularly excited about the conference this year because my wonderful graduate student, Jordyn Thomas, presented her first research at the meeting by delivering a poster entitled: A novel task that taps knowledge about the phonotactic properties of spoken words. This work is being done in collaboration with our colleagues Laura Steacy and Jay Rueckl at the University of Connecticut, Noam Siegelman at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Don Compton at FCRR. The study is being conducted with data recently collected in the P20 project on the Developmental English Lexicon Project funded by the National Institutes of Health (NICHD) led by Don Compton.
Jordyn is an early career scholar who is working on topics related to the intersection of language variation (namely variation in spoken language dialect in English, specifically African American English) and reading development. The task that we’ve developed requires child participants to identify which of a pair (2AFC) of aurally delivered nonwords is more “wordlike,” where pairs have been manipulated as a function of the statistical properties of phonotactics contained in thier onset and codas. A set of critical items are manipulated strategically to differentiate according to the African American English and Mainstream American English dialect. We are just starting to analyze the data – so more on the results of the study later.
I am also excited about our RA, Daniela Staton, who has been working in our lab for the last year as a high school student (!). Dani presented her research in a poster session with a presentation called “Implicit representation of letters in early reading development.” Dani’s interests are on the representational properties of early readers that arise from early experiences with print. 
Her study examines the behavior of Kindergarten and 3rd Grade children in a free sort activity where they are asked to sort the 26 letters of the English alphabet according to their naive intuitions about the “similarity” of the letters. Our results suggest that as children develop reading skills, letters are sorted increasingly in terms of the phonological properties that pairs of letters share (e.g., “f” and “v” become increasingly “similar” as reading experience grows. Daniela is starting her undergraduate career this fall at Stanford. I will disclose that I did not have the permission of the individuals whose (unaffiliated) legs appeared at the bottom of this photo – but I hope that posting it here does not offend anyone.