
Contact Information
603 E Daniel Street
M/C 716
Champaign, IL 61820
Biography
After receiving Ph.D. in the Cognitive Science of Teaching and Learning Division at the Department of Educational Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Stoops completed a one-year postdoctoral traineeship at Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and a three-year NIH-funded clinical postdoctoral traineeship with a double appointment in the Psychiatry Department at Columbia University, NY and the Schizophrenia Program at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research (Orangeburg NY). For her dissertation, she found that skilled readers process linguistic information earlier and more quickly in the visual system than previously thought. During her previous postdoctoral position in clinical psychology, she examined the neural bases of reading dysfunction in schizophrenia. Currently, she is a research scientist at the Learning and Language Lab (LeLaLab) where she investigates reading development from three perspectives:
- Computational analyses of naturalistic environments that support literacy developement i.e. human interactions "in the wild" (e.g. caregiver-child interactions during picture book reading at home)
- Experimental (online and lab-based: eye-tracking and EEG) investigations of text exposure as a key source of linguistic input for language development
- Computational modeling of visual and linguistic factors that modulate eye movements in skilled and developing readers
Research Interests
- Language Learning and Reading Development
- Computational Modeling
- Neuroscience of Visual Cognition
Education
Post Doc Columbia University
Post Doc Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
PhD University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
MA Texas Tech University
BA Moldova State University
AS Pedagogical College, Chisinau, Moldova
Grants
National Science Foundation (NSF): Understanding eye movements in skilled and novice readers - a behavioral and computational approach. Role: co-PI (PI: Montag, J; co-PI: Willits, J; Collaborator: Kindratenko, V). 2022-2025, $500,000.00
Awards and Honors
Fellow, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), 2021-2022
Facebook, Global Literacy and Accessability Challenge Research Award, 2018
Courses Taught
EPSY 405: Adolescent Psychology
EPSY 402: Psychology of Adult Learning
EPSY 201: Honors Symposium in Educatiton
EPSY 200: Educational Psychology
Additional Campus Affiliations
Research Affiliate, Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Urbana, IL
selected service activities
- SPIN (Students Pushing Innovation) program mentor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) since 2021. 2023 mentee won top prize for outstanding undergraduate research at the 2023 Engineering Open House as part of the SPIN 2023 team.
- In collaboration with the faculty members from the Intensive English Institute (IEI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she developed a new approach of teaching critical thinking skills for the beginning second language (L2) writers.
- In collaboration with a group of second language aquistion/bilingual language development researchers, she developed a free self-scoring language proficiency test for bilingual speakers and second language learners of Russian.
selected publications
- Stoops, A., & Montag, J.L. (submitted). Effects of individual differences in text exposure on sentence comprehension. doi: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-2846554/v1
- Stoops, A., Wu, M., Jung, I.H.T., & Montag, J.L. (revised & resubmitted). A novel corpus of naturalistic picture book reading with 2- to 3-year-old children. doi: 10.31219/osf.io/xbz9q
- Stoops, A., & Christianson, K. (2019). Parafoveal processing of inflectional morphology in Russian: a within-word boundary change paradigm. Vision Research, 158, I-10. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2019.01.012
- Stoops, A., & Christianson, K. (2017). Parafoveal processing of inflectional morphology on Russian nouns. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 29(6), 653-669. doi: 10.1080/20445911.2017.1310109
- Stoops, A., Luke, S. G., & Christianson, K. (2014). Animacy information outweighs morphological cues in Russian. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(5), 584-604. doi: 10.1080/01690965.2013.813560