Contact Information
M/C 708
Champaign, IL 61820
Biography
Kiel Christianson has taught at the university level in Germany, Japan, and the U.S. He is a two-time Fulbright Scholar, and conducted the first "field-psycholinguistics" study on syntactic processing in any indigenous North American language (Odawa). He is currently Director of the Educational Psychology Psycholinguistics Lab at the Beckman Institute, and Chair of the Department of Educational Psychology. His research has been funded by NSF, NIH, and Procter & Gamble.
Research Interests
psycholinguistics
bilingualism & SLA
reading
Research Description
Dr. Christianson studies syntactic parsing, sentence comprehension in reading and listening, reading, language production, bilingualism, and morphological processing.
Education
Linguistics, PhD, Michigan State University
Awards and Honors
two-time Fulbright recipient
NSF CAREER Award (2009-2014)
University of Illinois Campus Award for Excellence in Advising Undergraduate Research (2019)
Illinois College of Educaiton Distinguished Scholar (2019)
Illinois Colleg eof Educaiton David Zola Career Teaching Excellence Award (2020)
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Educational Psychology
Professor, Psychology
Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Director, Second Language Acquisition & Teacher Education (SLATE) Program, Center for Translation Studies
Chair, Educational Psychology
External Links
Honors & Awards
two-time Fulbright recipient
NSF CAREER Award (2009-2014)
University of Illinois Campus Award for Excellence in Advising Undergraduate Research (2019)
Illinois College of Educaiton Distinguished Scholar (2019)
Illinois Colleg eof Educaiton David Zola Career Teaching Excellence Award (2020)
Recent Publications
Dempsey, J., Tsiola, A., Bosch, N., Christianson, K., & Stites, M. (2025). Eye-movement indices of reading while debugging Python source code. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 37(2), 89-107. https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2024.2447117
Dempsey, J., Christianson, K., & Van Dyke, J. A. (2025). Linguistically-driven text formatting improves reading comprehension for ELLs and EL1s. Reading and Writing, 38(4), 1107-1128. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-024-10548-1
Christianson, K., Dempsey, J., Tsiola, A., Deshaies, S. E. M., & Kim, N. (2024). Retracing the garden-path: Nonselective rereading and no reanalysis. Journal of Memory and Language, 137, Article 104515. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2024.104515
Dempsey, J., Liu, Q., & Christianson, K. (2024). Syntactic adaptation leads to updated knowledge for local structural frequencies. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77(2), 363-382. Article 174702182311729. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218231172908
Rattanasak, S., Pongpairoj, N., & Christianson, K. (2024). Effects of working memory capacity and distance-based complexity on agreement processing: A crosslinguistic competition account. Applied Linguistics Review, 15(3), 1151-1176. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2022-0035