Biography:
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Language Science at Pennsylvania State University. I received my M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Davis. My past research has centered on the following topics: (1) individual differences in reading behavior and comprehension ability, (2) the behavioral and neural correlates of psycholinguistic phenomena in sentence processing, particularly at the syntax-semantics interface, and (3) language comprehension in populations with communicative disorders. At the CLS, I will be extending my work in monolinguals to investigate late sentence processing effects in bilinguals.
Selected Publications:
Zirnstein, M., Swaab, T.Y., & Traxler, M.J. (in preparation). ERP Evidence for Contextual Influence over Complement Coercion.
Zirnstein, M., Traxler, M.J., & Baynes, K. (in preparation). A Lesion Study of Enriched Composition.
Tooley, K.M., Swaab, T.Y., Boudewyn, M.A., Zirnstein, M. & Traxler, M.J. (in submission). Priming Across Intervening Sentences: Implicit Learning Contributes to Syntactic Priming in Comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes.
Miller, L.M.S., Zirnstein, M., & Chan, P.K. (in press). Knowledge Differentially Supports Memory for Nutrition Information in Later Life. Journal of Health Psychology.
Traxler, M.J., Foss, D.J., Podali, R., & Zirnstein, M. (2012). Feeling the Past: The absence of experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on text processing. Memory & Cognition.
Traxler, M.J., Johns, C.L., Long, D.L., Zirnstein, M., Tooley, K.M., & Jonathan, E. (2012). Individual differences in eye-movements during reading: Working memory and speed-of-processing effects. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 5(1):5, 1-16.