{"id":253,"date":"2017-10-16T19:11:32","date_gmt":"2017-10-16T19:11:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-psychology\/facultystaff\/arieljames\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T18:00:35","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T18:00:35","slug":"arieljames","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/psychology\/facultystaff\/arieljames\/","title":{"rendered":"Ariel James"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Ariel James\u2019s research concerns the relationship between language processing and other cognitive abilities, and is at the intersection of the experimental and correlational disciplines of psychology. What makes some sentences harder to understand than others, and how can differences between comprehenders shed light on that? Why are some people better comprehenders than others, and what measures can we use to predict that? Her work explores these questions by assessing sentence comprehension, either during reading or listening, along with a number of other individual characteristics like reading experience, vocabulary, and general cognitive skills like working memory and attention. A recurring theme is addressing the challenges in measuring these individual characteristics in a valid and reliable way. She has a broader interest in replication and meta-analysis in psycholinguistics, including a large-scale meta-analysis of syntactic priming.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Ariel teaches courses on cognitive psychology, including a seminar on Intelligence.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n
Education<\/strong><\/h5>\n

BA: Stanford University
\nMA and PhD: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign<\/p>\n

Publications<\/strong><\/h5>\n
    \n
  • James, A. N.<\/strong>, *Minnehan, C.J. & Watson, D. (2023). Reading experience predicts eye movements during online auditory comprehension. <\/span>Journal of Cognition<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> 6<\/span><\/i>(1): 30, 1\u201329. DOI: https:\/\/doi.org\/10.5334\/joc.285<\/span><\/li>\n
  • <\/li>\n
  • \n
    James, A.N.<\/strong>, Fraundorf, S., Lee, E., & Watson, D. (2018). Individual differences in
    \nsyntactic processing: Is there evidence for reader-text interactions? Journal of Memory<\/em>
    \nand Language, 102<\/em>, 155-181.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  • <\/li>\n
  • \n
    Harrington Stack, C., James, A.N.<\/strong>, & Watson, D. (2018). A failure to replicate rapid
    \nsyntactic adaptation in comprehension. Memory and Language, 46<\/em>, 864-877.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  • <\/li>\n
  • \n
    James, A.N.<\/strong> & Watson, D. (2018). “Individual differences in the Visual World Paradigm,\u201d
    \nin The Interactive Mind: Language, Vision and Attention. F. Huettig, N. Mani, and
    \nR. Mishra (Eds.). Macmillan Publishers.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  • <\/li>\n
  • \n
    Mahowald, K., James, A.N.<\/strong>, Futrell, R., & Gibson, E. (2017). Structural priming is most
    \nuseful when the conclusions are statistically robust (Commentary). Behavioral and<\/em>
    \nBrain Sciences, 40<\/em>.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  • <\/li>\n
  • \n
    Mahowald, K., James, A.N.<\/strong>, Futrell, R., & Gibson, E. (2016). A meta-analysis of syntactic<\/div>\n
    priming in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 91<\/em>, 5-27.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
  • <\/li>\n
  • \n
    Gillespie, M., James, A.N.<\/strong>, Federmeier, K., & Watson, D. (2014). Verbal working memory predicts co-speech gesture: Evidence from individual differences. Cognition, 132<\/em>, 174-180.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2403,"template":"","class_list":["post-253","profile","type-profile","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1731,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/253\/revisions\/1731"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/psychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}