Skip to main content

Kiel Christianson

Profile picture for Kiel Christianson

Contact Information

240 Education
M/C 708
Champaign, IL 61820
Professor of Educational Psychology

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

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., 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

Christianson, K., Dempsey, J., M. Deshaies, S. E., Tsiola, A., & Valderrama, L. P. (2023). Do readers misassign thematic roles? Evidence from a trailing boundary-change paradigm. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 38(6), 872-892. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2023.2171071

Dempsey, J., Tsiola, A., & Christianson, K. (2023). Eye-tracking evidence from attachment structures favors a serial model of discourse–sentence interactivity. Discourse Processes, 60(9), 613-633. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2023.2260246

Dempsey, J., Tsiola, A., Chantavarin, S., Ferreira, F., & Christianson, K. (2023). Nonce word evidence for the misinterpretation of implausible events. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 35(5), 526-544. https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2023.2216913

Lim, J. H., & Christianson, K. (2023). Cross-script L1–L2 and L2–L1 masked translation priming and phonological priming: Evidence from unbalanced Korean–English bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 27(5), 862-881. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069221142405

View all publications on Illinois Experts