Elisabet Service

Biography

Dr. Elisabet Service is an Associate Professor and the Graduate Program Chair in the Department of Linguistics and Languages at McMaster University. She co-directs the Language, Memory & Brain Lab with Dr. John Connolly. Their lab combines experimental behavioural methods and collaborative research studying brain responses with different methodologies (ERP, fMRI). 

Research Interest

Dr. Service’s research incorporates three major elements: working memory, language and dyslexia. She started her research career in Helsinki, Finland, by investigating how working memory is involved in learning a second or foreign language. It turned out that phonological aspects of memory, i.e. the ability to form representations for how foreign words sound, were a powerful predictor for ease of language learning. As this type of memory is also critical in learning to read, Dr. Service expanded into research on the causes of dyslexia. Over the years, she has done basic research in the area of memory, but also applied working memory concepts and methods for studying morphological complexity in the mental lexicon, sentence processing, language acquisition, bilingualism, reading difficulty, and developmental language disorder (DLD). Dr. Service has mainly used memory tasks, but also EEG and MEG (magnetoencephalography) based measures in collaborative projects. She is still looking for the elementary cognitive building blocks that play a key role in language development, language learning and successful literacy, lately concentrating on representation of serial order in working memory.