Michael Harm's Research Page

I'm a Postdoc researcher at CMU's Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition working with Dr. David Plaut

Ph.D. 1998, University of Southern California while a member of the USC Language and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. Advisor: Dr. Mark S. Seidenberg

Research Interests:

Human cognitive processes in language, particularly normal and disordered reading.

Current Projects:

• Construction of a model of word recognition showing the interaction of orthographic, phonological and semantic factors (the "triangle" model of Seidenberg and McClelland 1989). Looks at the influence of word regularity, frequency, homophony and imageability on the division of labor between semantic and phonological paths. Work done in collaboration with Mark Seidenberg.

• Empirical investigations of some phenomena in reading using the triangle model as a theoretical framework. Will be looking at the effect of masking visual stimuli on the frequency by regularity interaction. Also, will attempt to run Van Orden's (1987) paradigm using stimuli from both dense and sparse orthographic neighborhoods.

• A sentence processing model using a framework similar to the above "triangle" model, extended to the processing of several words in sequence. The work attempts to explore the interaction of syntactic, pragmatic and lexical biases in the online resolution of locally ambiguous phrases. Work done in collaboration with Robert Thornton and Maryellen MacDonald.

Tools

• I've written a neural net simulator, which I humbly named MikeNet. It's mainly for continuous-time recurrent backprop networks. Click here to download a copy.

• I also have some code to generate semantic features from WordNet's online database, for use in neural network simulations. Click here for more info and downloadable stuff.

Publications

• Harm, M.W., McCandliss, B.D. and Seidenberg, M.S. (in press) Modeling the Successes and Failures of Interventions for Disabled Readers. In press, Scientific Studies of Reading.

• Harm, M.W. & Seidenberg, M.S. (2001) Are there Orthographic Impairments in Phonological Dyslexia? Cognitive Neuropsychology, 18(1), pp. 71-92.

• Harm, M.W. & Seidenberg, M.S. (1999) Phonology, Reading Acquisition, and Dyslexia: Insights from Connectionist Models. Psychological Review, 106(3), pp. 491-528.

• Harm, M.W. & Seidenberg, M.S. (1996). Computational Bases of Two Types of Developmental Dyslexia. In Garrison Cottrell (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, LEA, p. 364-369.

• Harm, M.W, Altmann, L., & Seidenberg, M.S. (1994). Using Connectionist Networks to Examine the Role of Prior Constraints in Human Learning. In Aswin Ram and Kurt Eiselt (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, LEA, p. 392-396.

• Harm, M.W. (2002) Building Large Scale Distributed Semantic Feature Sets With WordNet Carnegie Mellon University/CNBC Tech Report PDP.CNS.02.01

Journal Articles in Preparation or Submitted

• Harm, M.W. & Seidenberg, M.S. (submitted) Computing the Meanings of Words in Reading: Division of Labor Between Visual and Phonological Processes Manuscript under review.

• Dagerman, K., MacDonald, M. and Harm, M.W. (in preparation) Aging and the Use of Contextual Information in Ambiguity Resolution Manuscript under review.

Thesis

• Harm, M.W. (1998). Division of Labor in a Computational Model of Visual Word Recognition. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Southern California, August 1998.

Presentations

• Harm, M.W. and Seidenberg, M.S. (2002) Modeling Reading Development From First Grade Text Talk given at the Annual Meeting of the American Education Research Association, New Orleans, LA, April 2002. Click here for a powerpoint version of my slides, or here for an html version.

• Harm, M. W. (2001) How do readers compute word meanings? Insights from the Triangle Model. Talk presented at the 11th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science, Quebec, CA, June 2001.

• Foorman, B. R., Perfetti, C., Seidenberg, M., Francis, D.J., and Harm, M.W. (2001) What kind of text is a Decodable Text? And what kind of text is an Authentic Text? Talk given at the Annual Meeting of the American Education Research Association, Seattle, WA, April 2001. Click here for a powerpoint version of my slides, or here for an html version.

• Harm, M.W. and Seidenberg, M.S. (2000) Division of Labor in a Multicomponent Model of Visual Word Recognition. Talk presented at the MRC Research Unit, July 2000, Cambridge, UK. Click here for a pdf version of the slides.

• Harm, M.W., McCandliss, B., and Seidenberg, M.S. (2000) A Connectionist Model of Impaired Reading and Reading Interventions. Talk given at the conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Stockholm, Sweden, July 2000. Click here for an abstract, here for a longer summary, or here for a pdf version of the slides.

• Harm, M.W., Thornton, R. and MacDonald, M.C. (2000). A Distributed, Large Scale Connectionist Model of the Interaction of Lexical and Semantic Constraints. Poster presented at the 2000 CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, San Diego, CA. Click here to download a pdf version.

• Harm, M.W., McCandliss, B. and Seidenberg, M.S. (2000). Understanding Impairments and Interventions in Dyslexia: A Connectionist Investigation of Learning to Read. Poster presented at the 2000 Cognitive Neuroscience conference, San Francisco, CA. Click here to download a pdf version.

• Harm, M.W. & Seidenberg, M.S. (1999) Division of Labor in the Triangle Model of Visual Word Recognition. Poster Presented at the 1999 Meeting of the Psychonomics Society. Click here for a compressed postscript version or here for a pdf version.

• Harm, M.W. & Seidenberg, M.S. (1998). "Orthographic" Effects in Phonological Dyslexia. Poster presented at the 1998 Cognitive Neuroscience Conference, San Francisco, CA. Click here to view a PDF version of the poster.

• Harm, M.W. & Seidenberg, M.S. (1997). Reading with and without phonological mediation: A connectionist investigation. Talk presented at the 1997 Computational Psycholinguistics Conference, Berkeley, CA (Click here to download 3 page pdf abstract).

• Gonnerman, L., Harm, M.W. & Andersen, E. (1997). The role of Frequency in Modeling Double Dissociations. Poster presented at the 19th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

• Seidenberg, M.S. & Harm, M.W. (1995). Division of Labor and Masking in a Multicomponent Model of Word Recognition. Paper presented at the 36th Annual Meeting of The Psychonomic Society, Los Angeles, CA, 1995

• Stevens, K., Harm, M.W, Schuster, S.P., & MacDonald, M.C. (1995). Aging and the use of context and frequency information during ambiguity resolution. Poster presented at the 7th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.

Other Professional Activities

• Member, American Psychological Association, Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Psychonomic Society, Society for the Scientific Study of Reading
• Reviewed journal articles for: Psychological Review, Memory and Cognition, Cognitive Neuropsychology, Cognition, The Journal of Experimental Psychology (LMC), Scientific Studies of Reading, Journal of Memory and Language, Neuropsychologia, Cognitive Science, The Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Connection Science.

My Work Address

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