Research Programme
Research
I am an experimental psycholinguist trained in cognitive psychology, studying how people process language in real time. My research spans comprehension and production in first- and second-language contexts, with a particular emphasis on Thai and English. I also develop psycholinguistic datasets and experimental materials for Thai, a language that remains comparatively under-represented in cognitive and psycholinguistic research.
Two strands run through much of this work. The first examines how lexical, semantic, sensorimotor, and visual information contributes to word recognition, object processing, lexical access, and production, and is informed in part by experiential and embodied approaches to conceptual representation. The second takes a cognitive, component-process approach to individual variation in language performance. It is established most clearly in work on L2 reading comprehension, is extending into speech perception and production, and provides a foundation for future work on listening comprehension and general speaking performance. Across both strands, I am interested in how linguistic and conceptual knowledge is represented, accessed, and coordinated during real-time performance. I bring these strands together through the Cognitive and Language Processing (CLP) Lab.
Thai Psycholinguistic Resources
A major part of my research concerns developing resources that make controlled experimental work on Thai feasible. Psycholinguistic norms are standardised reference values, derived from ratings or behavioural measures, that help researchers select, match, and interpret experimental materials and findings. Norms developed for English or other languages cannot simply be assumed to generalise to Thai because words, pictures, and concepts may be named, experienced, and associated differently across linguistic and cultural contexts.
Measures such as imageability, frequency, age of acquisition, and familiarity can influence how efficiently people recognise or categorise words and pictures, or retrieve the names of pictured objects. Visual and sensorimotor properties can also shape processing because perceptual experience and action-related knowledge form part of conceptual representation. Reliable norms allow researchers to control for these influences and examine their contribution directly.
My research programme began by standardising 480 colour object photographs for Thai speakers, including measures of name agreement, category agreement and image agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, manipulability, and age of acquisition. It has since expanded to linked Thai word-level ratings, picture-naming performance data, and behavioural measures of motor affordance. Current extensions include curriculum-based objective age-of-acquisition measures, a postgraduate supervised research project on Thai affective word norms, and the development of measures of visual and orthographic complexity for written Thai.
Together, these resources support research on word recognition, semantic and object processing, lexical retrieval and spoken production, reading, and cross-linguistic comparison. The wider aim is to build cumulative Thai research infrastructure in which individual datasets and resources can be linked, extended, and reused.
Explore ResourcesL1 and L2 Language Processing
My work with ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) helped establish this particular research direction. I coordinated recruitment and testing of the Thai university sample and subsequently analysed that cohort to examine how linguistic knowledge and processing components jointly contribute to L2 English reading. The ENRO project assessed reading and listening comprehension, reading fluency, vocabulary, grammar, orthographic knowledge, word-level accuracy, and processing speed.
The component-process approach treats language performance as the outcome of interacting knowledge and processing components rather than as a single undifferentiated ability. My established work focuses on L2 reading comprehension and fluency, while developing work examines relations among speech perception, word recognition, and articulation. I am also interested in extending this cognitive approach to broader questions in L2 listening comprehension and spoken-language performance.
Sentence-comprehension research complements this work at a different level of analysis. Our self-paced reading work has compared the processing of subject- and object-extracted relative clauses in Thai and English, examining how language-specific properties influence where processing difficulty emerges. The programme has since been extended to examine English relative-clause processing among Thai and Japanese university EFL learners, with presentation and publication outputs in preparation.
Multilingual and Cross-Linguistic Psycholinguistics
Evidence about language processing has historically been drawn largely from English and a relatively limited range of other languages and populations. Cross-linguistic collaboration makes it possible to determine which findings are robust across languages and where language-specific patterns emerge, while norms and direct evidence for less-studied languages, including Thai, continue to expand.
I recently contributed to two major international collaborations and coordinated the recruitment and testing of the Thai samples. ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) examined English performance across first- and second-language populations, with the Lab's contribution focused on a Thai university EFL cohort. Semantic Priming Across Many Languages (SPAML) tested semantic priming directly in Thai as one of 19 experimental languages included in the first published phase of the study.
These collaborations helped shape the research programme now consolidated through the CLP Lab. They position Thai language data within wider accounts of language and cognition while strengthening the expertise and international research relationships that support future comparative work.
Memory, Retrieval, Production, and Ageing
My doctoral training was in cognitive psychology, where I conducted experimental research on human memory before later specialising in psycholinguistics. My thesis examined implicit memory, including production and identification processes, and incorporated research with younger and older adults using experimental memory tasks and psychometric measures. This background established expertise in experimental design, ageing, individual differences, and cognitive measurement, and continues to inform my research on representation, retrieval, and lexical access.
Current doctoral supervision is exploring lexical retrieval and word production in Thai speakers, including how ageing may shape access to words. This is an emerging direction centred on psycholinguistic models, behavioural tasks, and questions of measurement.
Methods
I use behavioural experiments and psycholinguistic norming studies to investigate language processing. My work includes reaction-time and accuracy paradigms, rating studies, picture naming and word-production tasks, semantic categorisation, lexical decision, and reading and language component assessments. Methods and tools are selected according to the research question, the Thai or English linguistic context, and the participant sample.
Selected Publications
My publications appear under A. J. Benjamin Clarke and A. J. B. Clarke.
Semantic Priming Across Many Languages (SPAML)
Semantic priming is the faster recognition of a word when it follows a related rather than an unrelated word, such as recognising cake more quickly after dessert than after an unrelated word such as window. This international collaboration tested the effect across 19 languages and 25,163 analysed participants, finding a robust overall effect alongside meaningful cross-language variation.
L1 and L2 English Reading
ENRO examined the relationships between reading comprehension, reading speed, listening, vocabulary, grammar, orthographic knowledge, and word-level processing across 7,338 university students from diverse L1 and L2 backgrounds. Its findings supported a continuum of skill, ability, and experience rather than a simple first-language versus second-language divide.
Recipient of the 2024 Outstanding Article of the Year Award, Language Learning.
My subsequent study with the Thai cohort provided a more detailed analysis of the same component-process framework. Reading and listening comprehension were closely related, linguistic component skills explained more variation in comprehension than in reading fluency, and reading fluency depended partly on a distinct combination of component skills.
Thai Psycholinguistic Resources and Language Processing
This work shows how resource development and experimental research can reinforce one another. The Thai object norms established culturally and linguistically appropriate measures for 480 photographs. The mime initiation latency study provides a behavioural index of how quickly action knowledge becomes available when people view manipulable objects. Self-paced reading research found an overall processing advantage for subject-extracted over object-extracted relative clauses in Thai and English, while indicating that the principal location of difficulty differed in ways consistent with language-specific properties of Thai. This line of work continues through linked Thai norms and behavioural data to examine how lexical and conceptual variables shape language processing.