Education
Oberlin College A.B. 1956 Psychology
University of Iowa M.A. 1959 Psychology
University of Iowa Ph.D. 1960 Psychology
Main Positions Held
| 1960-1962 |
|
U.S. Public Health Service Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Cambridge, UK |
| 1962-1964 |
|
Research Fellow, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University |
| 1965-1968 |
|
Research Staff, Haskins Laboratories, New York, NY |
| 1968-present |
|
Senior Research Scientist, Haskins Laboratories,
New Haven, CT
|
| 1968-1970 |
|
Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Connecticut |
| 1970-2003 |
|
Professor of Psychology, University of Connecticut |
| 2003-present |
|
Professor Emeritus, University of Connecticut |
Selected Current and Past Professional Activities
Academy of Aphasia Program Chair
Editorial Board,
Applied Psycholinguistics, Cortex,
Reading Research Quarterly,
Board of Directors Academy of Aphasia
Board of Directors Haskins Laboratories
Selected Honors and Awards
National Institutes of Health Senior Postdoctoral Fellow,
University of Minnesota
Visiting Faculty Research Fellow, University of New England, Australia
Visiting Fellow, Wolfson College, Oxford University, UK
Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution, Society for the Scientific
Study of Reading (shared with A. M. Liberman and I. Y. Liberman).
Biography
As a graduate student at the University of Iowa in the 1950s, Donald Shankweiler was among the first generation of students to receive training in human neuropsychology. There he developed a life-long interest in the developmental problems of speech and reading and their neural bases. With his late colleagues, Isabelle and Alvin Liberman and Ignatius Mattingly, Shankweiler worked with the idea that reading is difficult in part because it forces a learner to focus rather unnaturally on the infrastructure of words to make sense of the mappings between a spoken language and its representation in writing. Dr. Shankweiler has helped to develop a laboratory for the study of eye movements in reading as a way to study how sentences are read and understood in real time. He is also a charter member of the group at Haskins Laboratories who are using cognitive neuroimaging to begin to understand how the brain is changed by experience with written language.
