Associate Professor Virginia Holmes

BA(Hons), BLitt, PhD

Reader and Associate Professor

Contact details:

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. My early research focused on syntactic processing in sentence comprehension and sentence production. Later and continuing work has concerned skills underlying proficient reading and spelling. My most recent interest centres on the part played by linguistic skills in the acquisition of numerical and mathematical competence. I have an enduring affection for France and its people, so I have included the study of the French language where possible in my research programme.

Research Interests:

• Language comprehension and production
• Cross-linguistic comparisons
• Reading and spelling ability
• Role of language in basic mathematical processing

Professional Associations:

• International Society for the Scientific Study of Reading
• Psychonomic Society (North America)
• Experimental Psychology Society (Britain)

Selected Publications:

Sentence comprehension :

Holmes , V. M. & Langford, J. (1976). Comprehension and recall of abstract and concrete sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 15, 559–566.

Holmes , V. M. & O'Regan J. K. (1981). Effects of syntactic structure on eye fixations during reading. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 20, 417–430.

Mitchell, D., & Holmes , V.M. (1985). The role of specific information about the verb in parsing sentences with local structural ambiguity. Journal of Memory and Language, 24, 542–559.

Holmes , V. M., Stowe, L. & Cupples, L. (1989). Lexical expectations in parsing complement-verb sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 501–522.

Sentence production:

Ford, M. & Holmes , V. M. (1978). Planning units and syntax in sentence production. Cognition, 6, 35–53.

Holmes, V. M. (1995) A crosslinguistic comparison of the production of utterances in discourse. Cognition, 54, 169-207.

Reading and spelling:

Holmes , V.M. & Ng, E. (1993). Word-specific knowledge, word-recognition strategies and spelling ability. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 1–28.

Holmes , V. M. & Carruthers, J. A. (1998). The relation between reading and spelling in skilled adult readers. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 264–289.

Holmes , V. M. & Castles, A. E. (2001). Unexpectedly poor spelling in university students. Scientific Studies in Reading, 5, 319–350.

Holmes , V. M. & Malone, N. (2004). Adult spelling strategies. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 17, 537–566.