Associate Professor Virginia Holmes
BA(Hons), BLitt, PhD
Principal Fellow
Contact details:
| email: vmholmes AT unimelb.edu.au | associated website: Language and Cognition Lab |
| telephone: +61 3 8344 6368 |
My undergraduate years were spent at Sydney University, followed by the completion of a PhD in Psychology at the University of Melbourne under the supervision of Kenneth Forster. After spending a post-doctoral year with Merrill Garrett at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, I returned to Australia to a lectureship in Psychology at the University of Melbourne. I was promoted to Reader in 1987, and retired from this position at the end of 2008. My early research focused on syntactic processing in sentence comprehension and sentence production, not only in English speakers but also in speakers of French. Later and continuing work has concerned skills underlying proficient reading and spelling in English. My most recent interest centres on the part played by linguistic and other cognitive skills in the acquisition of numerical and mathematical competence.
Research Interests:
- Reading and spelling ability
- Role of language in numerical and mathematical processing
- Language comprehension and production
- Comparisons across languages
Professional Associations:
- International Society for the Scientific Study of Reading
- Psychonomic Society (North America)
- Experimental Psychology Society (Britain)
Recent Publications:
See Full List of Publications
Holmes, V. M. (2009) Bottom-up processing and reading comprehension in experienced adult readers. Journal of Research in Reading.
Holmes, V. M. & Quinn, L. (2009) Unexpectedly poor spelling and phonological processing skill. Scientific Studies of Reading.
Holmes, V. M., Malone, A. & Redenbach, (2008). Orthographic processing and visual sequential memory in unexpectedly poor spellers. Journal of Research in Reading. Special issue on orthographic learning, 31, 136-156.
Holmes, V. M. & Segui, J. (2006). Assigning grammatical gender during word production. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. Special Issue on cross-disciplinary approaches to language processing, 35, 5-30.
Holmes, V. M. & Babauta, M. (2005). Single or dual representations for reading and spelling? Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Special issue on reading and spelling words, 18, 257-280.
Holmes, V. M. & Malone, N. (2004). Adult spelling strategies. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 17, 537-566.
Holmes, V. M. & Segui, J. (2004). Sublexical and lexical influences on gender assignment in French. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 33, 425-457.