Shauna's cognitive psychology research focuses on reading comprehension, or how readers process and represent written language. Further understanding the mechanisms involved in reading comprehension among adults will help to inform models of reading, which can be used to develop classroom instruction for learners, including the development of interventions, textbooks, and learning materials.

Within the broad area of reading comprehension, Shauna has established three main lines of research: incidental word learning, reader skill, and eye-movement control.

Incidental Word Learning

Incidental word learning is learning that occurs without the intentional or purposeful aim to learn a word. This is learning that happens as an indirect result of another activity, such as engagement in a language through reading or speaking, rather than learning that is the goal in and of itself. Most of the new vocabulary that adults learn is acquired incidentally during reading. This makes incidental methodology a more natural way to study vocabulary learning.  Shauna has conducted experiments investigating questions related to how different components of word knowledge—orthographic (spelling), semantic (meaning), phonological (sound/pronunciation), and morphosyntactic (grammar/root words)—are learned during reading (e.g., de Long & Folk, 2022).

Reader Skill

Shauna has studied the way in which reading skill influences learning and on the different means of evaluating reader skill.  She has looked at effects related to spelling skill, vocabulary size, and print exposure.  Notably, she has worked on projects to investigate error patterns during spelling production and to improve a spelling recognition test using item analysis procedures (Deibel, de Long, & Folk, under review).

Eye-movement Control

Eye tracking has shown that when we read, we skip around 30% of the words that we read. Many of these words are function words, such as prepositions and articles, but some are content words. There are many theories as to what might contribute to skipping behaviour, but Shauna and her colleagues have been investigating the possibility that one contribution is the size of a word’s orthographic neighbourhood—that is, the number words that can be created from a word by changing only one letter. Understanding this skipping behaviour provides the opportunity to understand more about how readers process words while reading.  

Abbreviations and Reading

Most recently, Shauna has been engaged in a line that was inspired directly by a student’s research question on learning about pseudohomophones (non-words that sound like real words) in discussions of cognitive psychology (Fanello & de Long, in prep). Their goal in conducting this research is to understand how readers process different SMS abbreviations when compared to real words. Past research has indicated that SMS abbreviations are not recognized as quickly as the fully spelled words (e.g., Perea, 2009). However, as younger generations of readers use SMS abbreviations with increasing frequency and from a younger age, it is possible that SMS abbreviations may be processed more like their fully spelled counterparts. Because context and familiarity can influence our ability to process words, they also aim to compare readers’ speed in processing SMS abbreviations in both formal and informal contexts. They found evidence that some types of SMS abbreviations may be processed more successfully than their fully spelled counterparts; more specifically, words that deleted vowels out-performed fully spelled words on a sentence verification task in both the formal and informal conditions. This early evidence seems to indicate that the way we process SMS abbreviations is changing alongside our use of technology.

As language diversity increases throughout the United States, it becomes increasingly necessary for educators to learn how to support students with different linguistic backgrounds, including emergent bilingual students.  Toward addressing this need, Shauna has worked on projects investigating how different teacher positions and family orientations are connected to the development of autonomy and mastery achievement goals among students with diverse linguistic backgrounds.

Teacher Positioning toward Cultural and Cognitive Autonomy

Kim et al. (2019) used a qualitative approach toward investigating the role teacher positioning plays on student autonomy (Kim, de Long, et al., 2019).  Nine middle-school teachers of predominantly emergent bilingual students were interviewed and their classroom practices were observed in order to understand how teachers positioned themselves in ways that supported or hindered their students’ cultural and cognitive autonomy.  Using constant comparative analyses through the lenses of critical race theory and achievement motivation theory, we ultimately found that the teachers tended to position themselves according to four patterns: supportive of cultural and cognitive autonomy, supportive of cognitive autonomy but not cultural autonomy, partially supportive of cognitive autonomy but not at all supportive of cultural autonomy, and supportive of neither cultural nor cognitive autonomy.  This study highlighted some of the difficulties teachers face in adjusting their pedagogical practices to meet the needs of the changing demographics of their students.  It emphasized the need for pedagogy that supports not only the cognitive autonomy of students, but also their cultural autonomy.

Family Orientation and Achievement Motivation

Kim et al. (2020) used a quantitative approach in investigating the connections between family orientation and achievement motivation (Kim, de Long, et al., 2020).  To this end, a path model analysis was conducted to better understand the relationships between the role of family orientations, achievement goal orientations, and parents’ and classroom goal structures among 331 linguistically diverse high school students.  The results of this analysis showed that family orientation acted as an indirect effect between parents’ and students’ achievement motivation goals.  This study joins the body of literature demonstrating that a holistic approach is needed to understand students and their pedagogical needs.