Early-Career Scholar Series Presenter: Jin Wang Ph.D. and Advanced-Career Scholar Facilitator Maryanne Wolf Ph.D.

In this talk, we will introduce a new study we are planning to conduct in regard to the longitudinal relationship between the neural basis of semantic processing and word reading skills in monolingual English-speaking children aged from 5 to 7 to 9 years old using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This study will be an extension of Dr. Wang’s dissertation work where she primarily focused on the longitudinal relationship between the neural basis of phonological awareness and word reading skills. This dissertation work provided systematic neural evidence clarifying the mechanism of why phonetic training facilitates word reading. She hopes that this new neural study can address whether semantic knowledge is crucial in the early stage of word reading and if so, what the mechanism could be. Dr. Wang is currently working on a pre-registration for this paper and has not yet looked at the data, she welcomes any suggestions/critics about the idea formation, hypotheses, and data analyses plan. This study is based on an existing Open Dataset on monolingual English-speaking children. In the next years after her Ph.D. students on board, she is interested in collecting pilots and exploring the longitudinal interaction between language skills (e.g., phonology and semantics) and reading skills in multilingual populations. Any collaborations are also welcome.

Jin Wang is an assistant professor in the department of education at UCLA started July 2024. She earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College in 2022 and did her post doc at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on language development in children from infancy to early elementary years and its relations to reading skills using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Please direct questions to Dr. Deborah Southern, desouth@ucla.edu