Author & Contact Info

I’m Mark Seidenberg, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was originally a psycholinguist but you could call me a cognitive scientist or cognitive neuroscientist and I’d be good with it. I grew up in Chicago, and went to a few colleges but only Columbia gave me any degrees, including a Ph.D. I was a professor at McGill University and then at the University of Southern California before returning to the Midwest in 2001. I’ve conducted a lot of research on language and reading. If you’re curious, this is our lab website.

My reading research addresses the nature of skilled reading, how children learn to read,  and the brain bases of reading and dyslexia, using the tools of modern cognitive neuroscience: behavioral experiments, computational models, and neuroimaging.  Recently I’ve been investigating the causes of chronically low reading among lower income and minority children—so-called “achievement gaps.”

My language research focuses on determining what we know when we know a language, how we acquire this knowledge, and how it’s used in comprehending language. Also how language compares to other human capacities, and to the communicative systems of other species.

I’m concerned about low literacy levels in this country and have been doing what I can to connect the science to educational practice.