Janet L. McDonald, Professor & Associate Department Chair

photo of McDonald

Office: 223A Audubon Hall
Department of Psychology
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
Office Phone: (225) 578-4116
Email: psmcdo@lsu.edu

 

Dr. McDonald is not accepting new students for Fall 2025. 

Research Interests

My research is done within the field of psycholinguistics. I am specifically interested in first and second language acquisition, bilingualism, and language comprehension.

Many of my research projects deal with language learning in adulthood. If you have studied a foreign language in high school or college, you probably have encountered some frustration. Unlike your native language, acquired when you were a child, learning a second language in adulthood seems effortful and difficult. Your ultimate level of mastery in the second language is also likely to be much less than that of native speakers. Some researchers speculate this is because there is a biologically determined critical period for language acquisition—that is, that language must be acquired early in life for mastery to be nativelike.

I am interested in alternative explanations of age of acquisition effects on language mastery based on cognitive processes. In particular, I am interested in exploring how differences in phonological ability, working memory capacity and processing speed influence grammatical mastery. My lab has examined this relationship in adult second language speakers, native speakers under processing stress, and in native speaking children.

There are numerous research opportunities in my lab for students who are interested in language acquisition, language comprehension or bilingualism (or who are bilingual themselves!) 

Teaching

Recent courses taught include:

  • PSYC 2001 Honors Introductory Psychology
  • PSYC 2016 Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences
  • HNRS 3000 Psychological Methods
  • PSYC 4033 Memory and Forgetting

Representative Publications

Kemp, L. S., & McDonald, J. L. (2021). Second language vocabulary acquisition:  The effects of semantic relatedness, form similarity, and translation direction. Language Learning, 71(3), 716-756.   

Perez, C. J. & McDonald, J. L. (2020). The contributions of proficiency, exposure, and working memory capacity to second language learners’ comprehension of indirect speech.  Applied Pragmatics, 2(2), 121-147.

McDonald, J. L. & Oetting, J. B. (2019).  Nonword repetition across two dialects of English:  Effects of Specific Language Impairment and nonmainstream form density.  Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. 62, 1381-1391.

Comeaux, I. S. & McDonald, J. L. (2018). Determining the effectiveness of visual input enhancement across multiple linguistic cues.  Language Learning, 68, 5-45. 

McDonald, J. L., Seidel, C. M., Hammarlund, R., Oetting, J. B. (2018). Working memory performance in children with and without specific language impairment in two nonmainstream dialects of English. Applied Psycholinguistics, 39(1), 145-167.

 

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