This study builds on McCarthy et al. (2012), which investigates the spelling skills of children with typical language, dyslexia, and dyslexia combined with developmental language disorder (DLD). The current McNair study aims to examine the specificity of these subgroups' spelling capacity for multimorphemic words, which require a deep understanding of morphological, phonological, orthographic, and semantic knowledge—areas in which children with dyslexia or dyslexia/DLD often struggle. This research explores the types of errors (illegal, correct, juncture) made in multimorphemic words using the computerized spelling sensitivity score. The study compares the spelling skills of children entering 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, diagnosed with typical language, dyslexia, or dyslexia/DLD. It discusses whether there are differences in how children with dyslexia and dyslexia/DLD represent multimorphemic words, given theories that children with dyslexia, whether in isolation or comorbidly, possess a mechanism supporting their ability to spell affixes (prefixes and suffixes). The results revealed no significant differences between the dyslexia and dyslexia/DLD groups in affix spelling accuracy, likely due to a small sample size. However, the study found a positive correlation between higher language scores and fewer affix errors. Further research is needed to determine if children with dyslexia spell morphemes more accurately than those with dyslexia/DLD, highlighting the need for morpheme-targeted interventions for children with DLD, which are currently limited.

Schizophrenia is a debilitating mental disorder characterized by hallucinations, delusions, a lack of motivation, and deficits in information processing, working memory, and attention. This study tests the ability of memantine, an FDA approved drug, to increase the effects of Targeted Cognitive Training, or TCT, a neuroplasticity based training program that has shown clinical, cognitive, and functional improvements in some antipsychotic medicated schizophrenia patients. Participants underwent two initial tests to assess their auditory processing speed. The first test took place in the absence of a drug, and the second had participants randomly assigned to memantine or placebo. Through a double blind design, participants then continued to receive either 30 sessions of placebo and TCT or 30 sessions of memantine and TCT followed by a durability assessment 12 weeks after the treatment phase. Cognitive and functional assessments administered periodically reveal preliminary results supporting the augmenting abilities of memantine on TCT for antipsychotic medicated schizophrenia patients.

Media coverage of acute mass violence events is ubiquitous and exposure to such content has been shown to cause acute stress- even increasing depression and anxiety to pathological levels. Individuals who spend hours per day consuming media related to a violent event even show significantly more stress symptoms than those directly exposed. Communicating with friends and family after a disaster is one important aspect of coping with stress and negative emotions. However, research has shown that not all communication is beneficial. The purpose of this study is to explore how two facets of communication: topic avoidance and co-rumination influence well being in a sample of college students (n= 350). Students at two California colleges ages 18-30 (M= 20.9, SD= 2.29, 85.7% female) completed an online survey reporting their communication with friends and parents about acute mass violence, media exposure, and social and emotional health. We predict that co-rumination will be inversely associated with social and emotional health and that high levels of topic avoidance will correlate with lower social and emotional health.

It is commonly known that the United States is lagging in language diversity compared to other countries, which might be due to common challenges young adults experience while learning a secondary language. These struggles are often results from having a fully developed native language; like, for example, how native English speakers struggle to learn the tonal pitch patterns of Mandarin Chinese, which change the entire meaning of words. These tonal categories can be difficult to learn through traditional study methods, but recent research has demonstrated successful incidental learning. During incidental learning, participants are exposed to task-irrelevant sounds while engaged in a separate visual-motor task. In the current study, we combine incidental learning of Mandarin tonal categories with eye-tracking technology. The goal of this research is to create an engaging incidental learning task that can assess learning on a finer timescale than previous paradigms.