David Braze is a linguist and senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories. His research focuses on the cognitive structures and processes that support the human ability to fluidly assemble compositional meaning from more-or-less novel strings of words. So, a central focus of his research is the question of how lexical, grammatical, semantic and pragmatic processes interact with one another to yield the apprehension meaning from the spoken and written word.

An exciting new direction in Dr. Braze’s research is designed to identify the specific learning mechanisms for those skills that underlie reading comprehension, and to better understand how they fail in low literacy individuals. Identifying specific links between learning capacities and literacy skills is essential for gauging potential for remediation. An important feature of this project is its use of experimental learning tasks to clarify the connections among capacities for learning in theoretically important domains of linguistic and orthographic structure, ranging from relationships among sounds within words, to improved efficiency in processing complex syntactic and semantic structures typical of written language.

If you would like to learn more about Dr. Braze’s work, please write to him directly. Contact details can be found on his web page.