Ph.D., University of South Carolina, 2004 Assistant Professor Member, Developmental Program and Social/Cognitive Program rwsmith@gsu.edu 404-413-6299 706C Urban Life

Research Interests

To date, my research has focused on vocabulary development and reading comprehension. The four central areas of my research are: (1) the processes that occur during the incidental acquisition of new word meaning from written text and during classroom instruction; (2) the assessment of vocabulary knowledge; (3) predictors of reading comprehension performance; and (4) properties of the text that elicit strategy use by the reader. The use of eye movement monitoring and a variety of assessment tools has provided a means to investigate these areas in both children and adults.

My interests in incidental vocabulary acquisition from written text are focused around basic research questions. I examine adult skilled readers’ recognition of contextual cues and how they use them to assign meaning to unfamiliar words. My interest in incidental vocabulary acquisition during classroom instruction has an applied focus. I am interested in how children’s word knowledge develops as a result of independent interactions with storybooks and vocabulary instructional materials and how this interaction is different for children who are at risk for school failure ( i.e., children raised in poverty and ethnic minorities).

Using an individual differences approach I also how examine text comprehension is influenced by several cognitive factors including oral language skills, conceptual and factual knowledge, and working memory. To explore this issue, either readers’ eye movements are monitored, comprehension questions are asked after participants’ read material offline, or some combination of the two methods. Close examinations of the validity of standardized tests is very important to answer research questions associated with this line of research. Oftentimes measures are designed for the relevant constructs but have not yet been adapted for use with the targeted population.

I have faculty affiliations with the Department of Educational Psychology and Special Education at GSU, the Florida Center for Reading Research, the Department of Child and Family Sciences, and the Department of Communication Disorders at Florida State University.

T.E.V.A. Laboratory

Dr. Williams Smith directs the Tracking Eye Movements and Vocabulary Acquisition Laboratory (T.E.V.A.). T.E.V.A. is a newly established laboratory that houses an Eyelink 1000 eye movement monitoring system. The Eyelink 1000 will be used to conduct research studies both in children and adults. Current projects in this lab include:

1. Children’s Resolution of Lexical Ambiguity-Children’s eye movements are monitored while they read single sentences that contain ambiguous target words. These ambiguous words either have two meanings that are equally likely or two meanings that have one dominant interpretation. There are two manipulations: 1) the amount of words that support a particular interpretation of the ambiguous word; and 2) the distance between the supporting information and the target word.
2. Adult’s Use of Context Clues to Acquire New Word Meaning- The eye movements of adults are monitored while they read short passages that contain repeated mentions of unfamiliar words. Context clues vary on their level of informativeness and their location in the text.

Representative Publications

Pence, K., Bojczyk, K.E., & Williams, R.S. (in press). Assessing Vocabulary Knowledge. In K. Pence (Ed.) Assessing Emergent and Early Literacy. San Diego, CA: Plural Press.

Traxler, M.J., Williams, R.S., Blozis, S.A. & Morris, R.K. (2005). Working memory, animacy, and verb class in the Processing of Relative Clauses. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 204-224

Traxler, M.J., McElree, B., Williams, R.S., & Pickering, M.J. (2005). Context effects in coercion: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 1-25.

Williams, R.S. & Morris, R.K. (2004). An eye movement analysis of word familiarity and vocabulary acquisition in skilled reading. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 16, 312-339.

Clifton, Jr., C., Traxler, M. J., Mohamed, M. T., Williams, R.S., Morris, R.K., & Rayner. K. (2003). The use of thematic role information in parsing: Syntactic processing autonomy revisited. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 317-334.

Morris, R.K. & Williams, R.S. (2003) Bridging the gap between old and new: Eye movements and vocabulary acquisition in reading. Hyona, J., Radach, R. & Deubel, H. (Eds.) The Mind's Eyes: Cognitive and Applied Aspects of Eye Movements (pp.235-252). Elsevier Science Publishers.

Sevostianov, A., Horowitz, B., Necheav, V., Fromm, S., Williams, R., & Braun, A. (2002). Comparing the names of pictures of objects: a one-back fMRI study. Human Brain Mapping, 16, 168-175.