LEARN MORE ABOUT THE LLL
WHY IS READING RESEARCH IMPORTANT?
Reading is an essential skill, and even more so now. In this Information Age, we are constantly bombarded by rich written texts. Access to this information, and full participation in society, begins with the foundational ability to read. Our research focuses on the skills that children and adults need to achieve full literacy. 
ABOUT THE LLL TEAM
​We are a diverse and well-rounded team of postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students, volunteers, and research staff. We get to work in a friendly and collaborative environment that includes weekly lab meetings and social (sometimes adventurous!) outings. We are supported by our lab manager for the day-to-day needs of our research endeavours, and we are all guided by Dr. Hélène Deacon. We are very fortunate to be connected, both nationally and internationally, to a wonderful group of collaborators who often come to visit, join in our meetings, and give colloquium talks. We are always looking for new ideas and energy, so join us!
WHERE CAN YOU FIND THE LLL?
We have a well-resourced lab in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Dalhousie University in the heart of vibrant Halifax, Nova Scotia. Much of our research takes place in schools in our beautiful city, with our collaborative work taking place in schools across the country and around the world.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED
Parent and Educators, check out For Parents & Teachers.
Students (graduate and undergraduate) and Postdoctoral Fellows, check out Join our Team.
MEET LLL DIRECTIOR DR. HÉLÈNE DEACON
2022 DONALD G. DOEHRING MEMORIAL LECTURE
In March of 2022, Dr. Hélène Deacon was honored to be invited to give the annual keynote Donald G. Doehring Memorial Lecture hosted by the McGill University School of Communication Sciences & Disorders. Watch her talk below titled "Breaking into reading: Skills that drive children’s reading development" in which she discusses two skills children use as they are learning how to read: knowledge of roots and affixes (i.e., morphological awareness) and sentences (i.e., syntactic awareness).

What we are currently investigating...

Learning new words: Recent research attention has turned to what children learn ‘unsupervised’, specifically, what they learn when they read on their own. We are particularly interested in knowing how skilled they are at learning the spellings and meanings of new words that they encounter in this independent reading (e.g., Deacon, Mimeau, Chung, & Chen, 2019). We are also interested in how children use this acquired knowledge to support their learning of other words and their word reading overall (e.g., Deacon, Pasquarella, Marinus, Tims, & Castles, 2019). This work will tell us more about the power of children’s independent learning! 

Sentence Comprehension: The sentences children encounter when reading texts tend to be far more complex than those they encounter in everyday conversation. We are interested in how the basic sentences children encounter in both written and oral language, and the difficult sentences they encounter mostly in written language, impact their reading comprehension (e.g., Sorenson Duncan, Mimeau, Crowell, & Deacon, 2020). This research can help us better understand which sentence types support children’s reading comprehension so we can better capitalize on the advantage they provide.

Morphological Skills: Morphology is the study of the building blocks of words and how they are combined to encode meaning. Morphological skills are what allow children to use these building blocks effectively in their written and oral language. They include things like morphological awareness and morphological decoding. Our research investigates how morphological skills are connected to children’s literacy skills like word reading (e.g., Robertson, & Deacon, 2019), spelling (e.g., Breadmore, & Deacon, 2019), and reading comprehension (e.g., Oliveira, Levesque, Deacon, & da Mota, 2020). We are also interested in the frameworks that highlight the mechanisms behind these connections (e.g., Levesque, Breadmore, & Deacon, 2020).

Prosodic Sensitivity: Prosody is the rhythmic patterning of speech and children’s prosodic skills are an increasing focus of reading research. We are interested in whether prosodic skills independently contribute to the development children’s literacy skills like word reading, text reading accuracy, and reading comprehension (e.g., Deacon, Holliman, Dobson, & Harrison, 2018). We also examine whether these relationships differ at the outset of reading development and when children are in the midst of it (e.g., Critten, Holliman, Hughes, Wood, Cunnane, Pillinger, & Deacon, 2020).

Students with a History of Reading Difficulties: University students are clearly expected to maintain a high-level of reading ability, however, there is a lack of understanding regarding how students with a history of reading difficulties approach the demanding literacy tasks that face them. Our research looks at how the literacy skills, study strategies, and academic achievement of these students differs from those without a history of reading difficulties (e.g., Bergey, Parrila, Laroche, & Deacon, 2019; MacKay, Laroche, Parrila, & Deacon, 2019). We hope to use this research to further develop an evidence-based approach to identifying and supporting academically at-risk students. See our past implementation guides made possible by funding from Canada's Office of Literacy and Essential Skills: Guide 1: Standard Outreach; Guide 2: Customized Outreach.

Second Language Acquisition: As more and more children throughout the world become second language learners (be that through immersion programs, immigration, etc.) researchers have become increasingly interested in how skills a child has acquired in their first language influence their learning of a second. For example, we have investigated whether children with a variety of first language backgrounds use their morphological awareness to aid in their French reading comprehension (Lam, Chen, & Deacon, 2019). Furthermore, with help from our international collaborators, we have considered whether first language Cantonese lexical tone awareness is associated with second language English vocabulary knowledge (Choi, Deacon, & Tong, 2019).