Rebecca Piorkowski
                              ?             
                      Graduate Student
Department of Cognitive Science
Johns Hopkins University
3400 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218
office: 239 Krieger Hall
phone: (410) 516-7625
email: rebecca@cogsci.jhu.edu
                        Primary advisor: William Badecker
 

Research Interests

    I am interested in speech perception and lexical access. Specifically, I wish to utilize various speech perceptual phenomena in an effort to differentiate between various models of speech perception and word recognition. I have just completed work on a project with Dana Boatman, Ph.D., whose primary affiliation is with the Johns Hopkins Medical Institute. We examined the phoneme processing abilities of children with Asperger's Syndrome. I am currently beginning to examine how phonological variation in the signal, such as place assimilation in English, impacts lexical access.

Education

• M.A., 2003, Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University
  Masters Thesis: The Role of Time-varying Amplitude Envelope Information  in Selective Adaptation to  Perceptually Restored Phonemes
            Advisor: William Badecker
   

• B.A., 1998, Barnard College, Columbia University, magna cum laude
  Senior Honors Thesis: The Role of Implicit Motives in Memory for Autobiographical Events
             Advisor: Barbara Woike

Publications, manuscripts, and poster presentations

Teaching Assistantships

• 050.307 Phonetics (Melissa Epstein) - Spring, 2004
• 050.102 Language and Mind (William Badecker) - Fall, 2003
• 050.330 Psycholinguistics (William Badecker) - Spring, 2003
• 050.105 Cognitive Neuropsychology (Michael McCloskey) - Fall, 2002
• 200.355 The Psychology of Decision Making: Behavioral Finance (Larry Raifman) - Fall,   2001

Graduate Coursework Completed

• 050.839 Research in Cognitive Science - Every semester
• 050.630 Topics in language processing (William Badecker) - Fall, 2003
• 050.815 Programming tools: Visual basic (James Hoffman) - fall, 2003
• 050.203 Cognitive Neuroscience (Brenda Rapp) - spring, 2004
• 050.641 (audit) Foundations of Cognitive Science B (Paul Smolensky) - spring, 2004
• 050.850 IGERT Reading Seminar (no professor) -  Spring, 2003
• 200.314 Advanced Research Design and Analysis (Amy Shelton) - Spring, 2003
• 050.629 Advanced Phonological Analysis (Paul Smolensky & Lisa Davidson) - Spring, 2003
• 050.832 (audit) Topics in Natural Language Processing (Robert Frank & William Badecker) - Spring, 2003 
• 050.626 Foundations in Cognitive Science (Paul Smolensky) - Fall, 2002
• 200.314 Advanced Statistical Methods (Amy Shelton) - Fall, 2002
• 050.330 Psycholinguistics (William Badecker) - Spring, 2002
• 050.620 Syntax (Anne Vainikka) - Spring, 2002
• 050.672 Formal Methods in Cognitive Science: Neural Networks (Paul Smolensky) - Spring, 2002
• 050.825 Research Seminar in Optimality Theory (Paul Smolensky) - Spring, 2002
• 050.625 Sound Structure in Natural Language (Luigi Burzio) - Fall, 2001
• 050.670 Formal Methods in Cognitive Science: Language (Robert Frank) - Fall, 2001
• 050.810 Spectrogram Reading (Elliot Moreton) - Fall, 2001
• 050.862 Topics in Cognitive Neuropsychology (Michael McCloskey) - Fall, 2001
 

Conferences Attended

IGERT Workshop: Integrative explanations in the cognitive science of language
Johns Hopkins University Conference on Spatial Language and Spatial Cognition
Psychonomic Society
Acoustical Society of America
CUNY Sentence Processing
Cognitive Neuroscience
American Psychological Association