Michelle Moore
Learning Research and Development CenterRoom 603
3939 O'Hara St.
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
TEL: 412-624-7083
FAX: 412-624-9149
EMAIL: mrm43@pitt.edu
I received a B.S. in both Life Science and Spanish at Penn State in 1998 and went on to earn my M.A. in Communication Sciences at Case Western Reserve in 2002. After working as a clinical speech–language pathologist for two years, in the fall of 2004 I began the doctorate program in Communication Science and Disorders at Pitt. In January, 2005 I joined the Fiez lab as a graduate student researcher. My general areas of focus are child language and reading disorders, with several specific topics of interest including phonology, grammatical morphology, and working memory as they pertain to children with language and reading impairments.
Recently I completed a study in which we examined the psychometric properties of a nonword repetition task that was designed similarly to another task but had increased articulatory demands. We framed this study in a broader context – i.e., by directly manipulating speech production demands of nonwords we may inform our understanding of the reasons for the poor nonword repetition performance of children with specific language impairment.
In the lab, I am currently overseeing the data collection and analysis of a neuropsychological study involving both normal adults and those with focal brain damage as part of a larger project to advance our understanding of the neural bases of verbal working memory and language processing. I am also working on a project to investigate the role of the right fusiform in reading using a novel, face-based orthography.