Brief description
Associate Professor - Deparment of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Human Sciences, Macquarie University
Full description
Associate Professor Genevieve McArthur completed her PhD in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Australia (1999) under the supervision of Dr John Hogben. She then took up a 5-year post-doctoral research position at Oxford University with Professor Dorothy Bishop (1999-2003). In late 2003, she moved to MACCS on an NHMRC Howard Florey Centenary Research Fellowship (2003-2005) and an NHMRC Project Grant (2003-2006) to work with Professor Max Coltheart. From 2008 to the present, she has been directing large NHMRC- and ARC-funded trials of different types of reading training in children with developmental dyslexia with her collaborators Professor Anne Nickels and Dr Saskia Kohnen. She directs the MACCS event-related potential (ERP) and fixation-related potential (FRP) laboratory (http://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/research/projects/dts/index.html).
The goal of her research is to understand (1) what causes dyslexia and specific language impairment (SLI), and (2) how these conditions should be treated. The results of her trial of auditory processing training in children with reading and language impairments suggests that around 40% of children with dyslexia and SLI have a general auditory processing or speech processing deficit, that these deficits can be fixed with training, but that this has no direct impact on reading, spoken language, or spelling impairments in children older than 6 years. The results of her trials of reading training in children with poor reading suggest that sight word training combined with phonics training leads to significant gains in the reading of children with developmental dyslexia. In future work, she plans to investigate the effect of training self-esteem and working memory in children who struggle to learn to read.
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