Posted on Jan 11, 2002

Seth Greenberg, Gilbert Livingston Professor of Psychology, was the featured speaker before a group of Reach Out and Read (ROAR) volunteers and officials including Albany Mayor Gerald Jennings at the Albany, Schenectady and Troy association of ROAR. He spoke on “Methods for Improving Reading One to One.” ROAR is sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Northeastern NY to help elementary school children improve their reading skills. Volunteers – including many Union students – spend an hour or more a week tutoring children from generally economically-needy areas. Greenberg also presented a paper with Jessica Zuehlke '01 on bilingual reading patterns. The paper, “Bilinguals detect letters in orthographies of both known languages,” explores how bilinguals process lexical homographs that appear in both of their fluent languages. Thus, “or” is a conjunction in English, but a content word meaning “gold” in French. The paper discusses whether English/French bilingual readers responding to a printed word can suppress one meaning of the word while activating the other. The paper was presented at the Psychonomic Society meeting in November, where Greenberg chaired a session on “Lexical Effects.”