Conrad Perry
School of Psychology
Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences
Eligible to supervise Masters and PhD - email supervisor to discuss availability.
My research focuses largely on written and spoken language processing. I use ideas from cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and mathematics to examine both theoretical and practical questions, such as what causes dyslexia and the best way children with it can be helped. I also examine other aspects of higher-level cognition that are typically but not always related to language processing including semantics, emotion, theory of mind and altruism.
I have experience running behavioural and neuroscience experiments on both normal and disordered groups. I am also interested in examining data using more modern machine learning techniques.
Research Project 1
Title: Examining the effect of visuo-spatial attention when reading
Project description: There are arguments about the extent to which and how visuo-spatial attention is used when reading. A number of people have looked at simple correlations between this type of attention and reading performance, and find some relationship, but they have not directly tested possible mechanisms nor elucidated their properties. One possibility is that focused visuo-spatial attention is used to help parse the letters of words, and this can be investigated by manipulating this type of attention and examining the effect it has on reading particular types of words.
Projects available for: Honours
Location: Helen Mayo Building
Research project start: Semester 1
Special requirements: None
Research Project 2
Title: Examining the extent to which graphemes are used in reading
Project description: It is typically assumed that when people translate letters into sound (read aloud) they do so by first grouping the letters of words into meaningful groups – i.e., graphemes (e.g., thick would be broken into three groups th.i.ck) rather than use only single letters. The experimental evidence for this is relatively weak, however. This may be because the experimental paradigms used to examine this are not especially sensitive to this process, and thus alternative paradigms may offer more insight. Further experimentation and statistical analyses of large-databases would be worth pursuing in this respect.
Projects available for: Honours
Location: Helen Mayo Building
Research project start: Semester 1
Special requirements: None
Research Project 3
Title: Investigating the time-course of emotion processing with concrete and abstract words.
Project description: A number of results using electroencephalography show that affective responses elicited from concrete words are weaker and occur later than with abstract words. This is somewhat surprising given concrete words like maggot can clearly have strong negative connotations. One potential reason for this is that, unlike abstract words, affective concrete words tend to be associated with many features that do not have affective content, and the processing of these slows the processing of affective information. Alternatively, it may simply be the case that the affective features of abstract words tend to be a larger and more important part of their representations. Differentiating these possibilities is theoretically important for our understanding of how emotional semantics is processed.
Projects available for: Honours
Location: Helen Mayo Building
Research project start: Semester 1
Special requirements: None
Research Project 4
Title: Investigating the direction of word stress assignment in English
Project description: There is a large literature on the way stress is assigned to words in English. However, the extent to which this has been investigated as a psychological rather than linguistic phenomenon is less. Some recent data in German suggests that, unlike as often suggested, stress assignment appears to occur from left-to-right rather right-to-left. Investigating this in English and whether different types of words cause different types of behaviour in this respect would help our understanding of the underlying mechanisms people use. These results have implications for some types of aphasia and children with language learning difficulties who make stress errors when speaking.
Projects available for: Honours
Location: Helen Mayo Building
Research project start: Semester 1
Special requirements: Some background in linguistics would be very helpful
Research Project 5
Title: Developing computational models of reading
Project description: There are currently two main computational models of reading that can predict how adults read aloud known and novel words. Only one of these models predicts outcomes of dyslexia. However, even that model has problems – it could be extended, the internal dynamics investigated better, and less psychologically plausible aspects of it entirely replaced. Further experiments could also be run to test between different aspects of the model and the predictions other models make.
Projects available for: HDR students
Location: Helen Mayo Building
Research project start:
Special requirements: Must have an interest in programming and computation.
Research Project 6
Title: The meaning of changed meanings lingers
Project description: A number of databases looking at words associated with racial and gender stereotypes across the last decades have recently become available. This is interesting because it should allow the extent to which these stereotypes remain with people even when they have fallen out of common use to be examined. Such stereotypes could be compared with concepts that have changed meanings but are not strongly associated with stereotypes or affective information. The processing of these could be elucidated using electroencephalography. This would give insight into the way semantics can change over time.
Projects available for: Honors; HDR
Location: Helen Mayo Building
Research project start:
Special requirements: At present, I don’t have access to good samples in Adelaide and obviously this requires older participants.
Research Project 7
Title: Examining effects of listening to atypically stereotyped voices
Project description: People change both the sound of their voice and the particular words they use (linguistic style) depending on the context of the situation. For example, it is well documented that that some females use a more masculine voice than normal to convey a sense of authority. I have investigated this using electroencephalography and found that people listening to such speech are affected relatively early and in a sustained way to such speech changes. However, it is not clear whether this effect is specific to females speaking in a masculine style, or whether it is a more general response to speech styles that are more generally incongruent with people’s expectations, even when the underlying reason for the different voice is quite different (e.g., males speaking in a feminine voice, which isn’t used to convey authority). This could be examined by using different types of speech incongruency.
Projects available for: Honours
Location: Helen Mayo Building
Research project start: Semester 1
Special requirements: Nil
Research Project 8
Project description: It is well known that relatively long words tend to be read more slowly than short words, and that words with difficult spelling-sound correspondences (e.g., chasm) tend to be read more slowly than words with simple correspondences (e.g., chips). However, the extent to which these effects are caused by different processes and whether the attentional resources they use can be distinguished is unclear. This could be examined using electroencephalography in a semantic priming paradigm.
Projects available for: Honours
Location: Helen Mayo Building
Research project start: Semester 1
Special requirements: Nil
Research Project 9
Project description: There is quite a bit of software that is supposed to help dyslexic children learn to read, and some of the effect sizes from small amounts of training seem unbelievable. I would like to get a review done looking at this.
Projects available for: Honours
Location: Helen Mayo Building
Research project start: Semester 1
Special requirements: Nil
Research Project 10
If you are interested in other aspects of language and want to run your project with my help, feel free to contact me.
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Journals
Year Citation 2024 Perry, C., Evertz, R., Zorzi, M., & Ziegler, J. C. (2024). Understanding the complexity of computational models through optimization and sloppy parameter analyses: The case of the Connectionist Dual-Process Model. Journal of Memory and Language, 134, 104468-1-104468-19.
Scopus12024 Perry, C. (2024). Using Monte-Carlo simulation to test predictions about the time-course of semantic and lexical access in reading. PLoS One, 19(4), e0296874.
2023 Perry, C. (2023). Graphemes are used when reading: Evidence from Monte Carlo simulation using word norms from mega-studies. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(2), 419-428.
Scopus2 WoS1 Europe PMC12022 Perry, C. (2022). Using electrophysiological correlates of early semantic priming to test models of reading aloud. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 5224-1-5224-12.
Scopus2 WoS1 Europe PMC12022 Perry, C., & Long, H. (2022). What is going on with visual attention in reading and dyslexia? A critical review of recent studies. Brain Sciences, 12(1), 87-1-87-11.
Scopus5 WoS2 Europe PMC32021 Paulesu, E., Bonandrini, R., Zapparoli, L., Rupani, C., Mapelli, C., Tassini, F., . . . Zorzi, M. (2021). Effects of Orthographic Consistency on Bilingual Reading: Human and Computer Simulation Data.. Brain sciences, 11(7), 878.
Scopus4 WoS1 Europe PMC12021 Walker, M., & Perry, C. (2021). It's the words you use and how you say them: electrophysiological correlates of the perception of imitated masculine speech. LANGUAGE COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE, 37(1), 1-21.
Scopus1 WoS12020 Ziegler, J. C., Perry, C., & Zorzi, M. (2020). Learning to Read and Dyslexia: From Theory to Intervention Through Personalized Computational Models. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(3), 293-300.
Scopus342020 Martin, D. U., Perry, C., MacIntyre, M. I., Varcoe, L., Pedell, S., & Kaufman, J. (2020). Investigating the nature of children's altruism using a social humanoid robot. Computers in Human Behavior, 104, 8 pages.
Scopus27 WoS182020 Martin, D. U., MacIntyre, M. I., Perry, C., Clift, G., Pedell, S., & Kaufman, J. (2020). Young Children's Indiscriminate Helping Behavior Toward a Humanoid Robot.. Front Psychol, 11, 239.
Scopus15 WoS5 Europe PMC22019 Martin, D. U., Perry, C., & Kaufman, J. (2019). Effects of a mirror on young children’s transgression in a gift-delay task. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 38(2), 14 pages.
Scopus3 WoS2 Europe PMC22019 Perry, C., Zorzi, M., & Ziegler, J. C. (2019). Understanding Dyslexia Through Personalized Large-Scale Computational Models. Psychological Science, 30(3), 386-395.
Scopus71 WoS49 Europe PMC282019 Perry, C., Willison, A. T., Walker, M. K., Nankivell, M. C., Lawrence, L. M., & Thomas, A. (2019). Working memory load affects early affective responses to concrete and abstract words differently: Evidence from ERPs. Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, 19(2), 377-391.
Scopus7 WoS4 Europe PMC42018 Allen, M., Perry, C., & Kaufman, J. (2018). Toddlers prefer to help familiar people. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 174, 90-102.
Scopus16 WoS12 Europe PMC32018 Perry, C. (2018). Reading orthographically strange nonwords: modelling backup strategies in reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 22(3), 264-272.
Scopus3 WoS22018 Perry, C. (2018). Testing predictions about the processing of word stress in reading using event-related potentials. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33(4), 424-442.
Scopus1 WoS12016 Martin, D., Perry, C., & Kaufman, J. (2016). An eye on animacy and intention. Frontiers in Psychology, 7(JUN), 2 pages.
Scopus12016 Parkes, L., Perry, C., & Goodin, P. (2016). Examining the N400m in affectively negative sentences: a magnetoencephalography study. Psychophysiology, 53(5), 689-704.
Scopus11 WoS10 Europe PMC22016 Ulicheva, A., Coltheart, M., Saunders, S., & Perry, C. (2016). Phonotactic constraints: implications for models of oral reading in Russian. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(4), 636-656.
Scopus10 WoS10 Europe PMC32015 Wickens, S., & Perry, C. (2015). What do you mean by that?! An electrophysiological study of emotional and attitudinal prosody. PLoS One, 10(7), e0132947-1-e0132947-24.
Scopus16 WoS12 Europe PMC52014 Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C., & Zorzi, M. (2014). CDP++.Italian: modelling sublexical and supralexical inconsistency in a shallow orthography. PLoS ONE, 9(4), e94291-1-e94291-13.
Scopus29 WoS26 Europe PMC142014 Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C., & Zorzi, M. (2014). When silent letters say more than a thousand words: An implementation and evaluation of CDP++ in French. Journal of Memory and Language, 72(1), 98-115.
Scopus24 WoS182014 Ziegler, J. C., Perry, C., & Zorzi, M. (2014). Modelling reading development through phonological decoding and self-teaching: implications for dyslexia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1634), 20120397-1-20120397-9.
Scopus146 WoS111 Europe PMC362013 Wong Kwok Shing, R., Perry, C., MacWhinney, B., & Oi-ling, I. W. (2013). Relationships between receptive vocabulary in English and Cantonese proficiency among five-year-old Hong Kong Kindergarten children. Early Child Development and Care, 183(10), 1407-1419.
Scopus4 WoS32013 Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C., & Zorzi, M. (2013). A computational and empirical investigation of graphemes in reading. Cognitive Science, 37(5), 800-828.
Scopus39 WoS34 Europe PMC192013 Perry, C. (2013). Graphemic parsing and the basic orthographic syllable structure. Language and Cognitive Processes, 28(3), 355-376.
Scopus6 WoS52010 Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C., & Zorzi, M. (2010). Beyond single syllables: Large-scale modeling of reading aloud with the Connectionist Dual Process (CDP++) model. Cognitive Psychology, 61(2), 106-151.
Scopus280 WoS239 Europe PMC1302010 Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C., Braun, M., & Zorzi, M. (2010). Rules versus statistics in reading aloud: New evidence on an old debate. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 22(5), 798-812.
Scopus18 WoS162009 Perry, C., Wong, R. K. S., & Matthews, S. (2009). Syllable timing and pausing: Evidence from cantonese. Language and Speech, 52(1), 29-53.
Scopus4 WoS3 Europe PMC22009 Ziegler, J. C., Perry, C., & Zorzi, M. (2009). Additive and Interactive Effects of Stimulus Degradation: No Challenge for CDP+. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 35(1), 306-311.
Scopus16 WoS17 Europe PMC32008 Ziegler, J. C., Castel, C., Pech-Georgel, C., George, F., Alario, F. X., & Perry, C. (2008). Developmental dyslexia and the dual route model of reading: Simulating individual differences and subtypes. Cognition, 107(1), 151-178.
Scopus177 WoS149 Europe PMC892007 Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C., & Zorzi, M. (2007). Nested incremental modeling in the development of computational theories: The CDP+ model of reading aloud.. Psychological Review, 114(2), 273-315.
Scopus561 WoS481 Europe PMC2722006 Perry, C., Kan, M. K., Matthews, S., & Wong, R. K. S. (2006). Syntactic ambiguity resolution and the prosodic foot: Cross-language differences. Applied Psycholinguistics, 27(3), 301-333.
Scopus3 WoS32005 Perry, C., & Zhuang, J. (2005). Prosody and lemma selection. Memory and Cognition, 33(5), 862-870.
Scopus2 WoS2 Europe PMC12004 Peng, D. L., Ding, G. S., Perry, C., Xu, D., Jin, Z., Luo, Q., . . . Deng, Y. (2004). fMRI evidence for the automatic phonological activation of briefly presented words. Cognitive Brain Research, 20(2), 156-164.
Scopus45 WoS41 Europe PMC242004 Hutzler, F., Ziegler, J. C., Perry, C., Wimmer, H., & Zorzi, M. (2004). Do current connectionist learning models account for reading development in different languages?. Cognition, 91(3), 273-296.
Scopus77 WoS70 Europe PMC232004 Perry, C., & Ziegler, J. C. (2004). Beyond the two-strategy model of skilled spelling: Effects of consistency, grain size, and orthographic redundancy. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A: Human Experimental Psychology, 57(2), 325-356.
Scopus26 WoS24 Europe PMC62003 Ziegler, J. C., Perry, C., & Coltheart, M. (2003). Speed of lexical and nonlexical processing in French: The case of the regularity effect. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 10(4), 947-953.
Scopus58 WoS51 Europe PMC212003 Luo, Q., Perry, C., Peng, D., Jin, Z., Xu, D., Ding, G., & Xu, S. (2003). The neural substrate of analogical reasoning: An fMRI study. Cognitive Brain Research, 17(3), 527-534.
Scopus86 WoS76 Europe PMC472003 Ziegler, J., Perry, C., Ma-Wyatt, A., Ladner, D., & Schulte-Korne, G. (2003). Developmental dyslexia in different languages: Language-specific or universal?. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 86(3), 169-193.
Scopus343 WoS299 Europe PMC1412003 Peng, D. L., Xu, D., Jin, Z., Luo, Q., Ding, G. S., Perry, C., . . . Liu, Y. (2003). Neural basis of the non-attentional processing of briefly presented words. Human Brain Mapping, 18(3), 215-221.
Scopus38 WoS37 Europe PMC302003 Perry, C. (2003). A phoneme-grapheme feedback consistency effect. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 10(2), 392-397.
Scopus22 WoS19 Europe PMC72003 Perry, C. (2003). Priming the rules of spelling. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A: Human Experimental Psychology, 56 A(3), 515-530.
Scopus11 WoS12 Europe PMC42003 Ding, G., Perry, C., Peng, D., Ma, L., Li, D., Xu, S., . . . Yang, J. (2003). Neural mechanisms underlying semantic and orthographic processing in Chinese-English bilinguals. NeuroReport, 14(12), 1557-1562.
Scopus77 WoS60 Europe PMC352002 Perry, C., & Ziegler, J. C. (2002). On the nature of phonological assembly: Evidence from backward masking. Language and Cognitive Processes, 17(1), 31-59.
Scopus20 WoS192002 Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C., & Coltheart, M. (2002). A dissociation between orthographic awareness and spelling production. Applied Psycholinguistics, 23(1), 43-73.
Scopus28 WoS272002 Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C., & Coltheart, M. (2002). How predictable is spelling? developing and testing metrics of phoneme-grapheme contingency. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A: Human Experimental Psychology, 55(3), 897-915.
Scopus39 WoS34 Europe PMC122002 Perry, C. (2002). A consonant-vowel priming effect in nonword spelling. Australian Journal of Psychology, 54(1), 25-31.
2002 Perry, C., & Ziegler, J. C. (2002). Cross-language computational investigation of the length effect in reading aloud. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 28(4), 990-1001.
Scopus28 WoS25 Europe PMC102001 Ziegler, J. C., Perry, C., Jacobs, A. M., & Braun, M. (2001). Identical words are read differently in different languages. Psychological Science, 12(5), 379-384.
Scopus181 WoS158 Europe PMC772001 Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108(1), 204-256.
Scopus3136 WoS2693 Europe PMC13762000 Ziegler, J. C., Perry, C., & Coltheart, M. (2000). The DRC model of visual word recognition and reading aloud: An extension to german. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 12(3), 413-430.
Scopus89 WoS822000 Ziegler, J. C., Tan, L. H., Perry, C., & Montant, M. (2000). Phonology Matters: The Phonological Frequency Effect in Written Chinese. Psychological Science, 11(3), 234-238.
Scopus58 WoS48 Europe PMC252000 Perry, C., & Ziegler, J. C. (2000). Linguistic difficulties in language and reading development constrain skilled adult reading. Memory and Cognition, 28(5), 739-745.
Scopus13 WoS15 Europe PMC51999 Perry, C. (1999). Testing a computational account of category-specific deficits. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 11(3), 312-320.
Scopus10 WoS8 Europe PMC41999 Coltheart, M., Woollams, A., Kinoshita, S., & Perry, C. (1999). A position-sensitive stroop effect: Further evidence for a left-to-right component in print-to-speech conversion. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 6(3), 456-463.
Scopus66 WoS65 Europe PMC331998 Ziegler, J. C., & Perry, C. (1998). No more problems in Coltheart's neighborhood: Resolving neighborhood conflicts in the lexical decision task. Cognition, 68(2), B53-B62.
Scopus85 WoS79 Europe PMC41 -
Book Chapters
Year Citation 2019 Ziegler, J. C., Perry, C., & Zorzi, M. (2019). Modeling the variability of developmental dyslexia. In L. Verhoeven, C. Perfetti, & K. Pugh (Eds.), Developmental Dyslexia across Languages and Writing Systems (pp. 350-371). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
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Conference Papers
Year Citation 1995 Perry, C. (1995). Integrated developmental connectionist model of orthography to phonology and orthography to semantics translation. In IEEE International Conference on Neural Networks - Conference Proceedings Vol. 6 (pp. 2960-2964). -
Preprint
Year Citation 2023 Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C., Zorzi, M., & Evertz, R. (2023). Understanding the complexity of computational models through optimization and sloppy parameter analyses: The case of the Connectionist Dual-Process model.
DOI
Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C., & Zorzi, M. (2021-2023). Learning how people read: Models, brains, big data and maths. . Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP 210100936). $213,000
Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C., & Zorzi, M. (2017-2019). Understanding reading development and dyslexia across languages via large scale quantitative modelling. Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP 170101857) $150,000
Kaufman, K., Davis, H., & Perry, C., Highfield, K. (2020-2022). Evaluation of the Early Learning Languages Australia Foundation to Year 2 trial. Australian Government, Department of Education and Training. $440,000
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