Daniel Schmidtke

Daniel Schmidtke

Research Associate

McMaster University

I’m a psycholinguist specializing in second language reading development. I work as a Research Associate with the MELD program at McMaster University, and as a Research Fellow at the College Student Success Innovation Centre (CSSIC), a partnership between McMaster University and Mohawk College in Ontario, Canada. I also serve as co-editor of The Mental Lexicon.

You can find my published work below - projects I’ve been lucky to work on with an incredible group of researchers, mentors, and colleagues over the years.

Interests

  • Reading development
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Eye-movements
  • Morphology
  • Quantitative linguistics
  • Reproducible science

Education

  • PhD in Cognitive Science of Language, 2016

    McMaster University, Canada

  • MSc in Developmental Linguistics, 2011

    University of Edinburgh, UK

  • BA in English Language and Linguistics, 2010

    York St. John University, UK

Research

My primary research interest is in reading development. I use a variety of tools, including eye-tracking and quantitative linguistic methods, to delve into how linguistic, cognitive, and experiential factors influence reading behavior.

My current research focus is on individual differences in the development of reading skill among international students who use English as an additional language. This SSHRC-funded research project examines longitudinal change in reading skills among international students enrolled in McMaster University’s pre-sessional English for academic purposes (EAP) programs.

As Mohawk College’s College Student Success Innovation Centre (CSSIC) Research Fellow, I am investigating literacy development among international students enrolled in Mohawk College’s EAP program. This research project involves implementing and testing a targeted reading intervention which is aimed at enriching the academic English skills of international students at Mohawk College. You can read more about CSSIC and about the project here.

Recent Projects

Here are some projects that have recently been published.

Reading development over 4 years: eye-tracking from EAP to undergrad

How does English reading development unfold after a bridging (EAP) program ends? We followed the same international students across ~4 years and used eye-tracking to watch L2 reading development unfold in real time. We asked: Which skills grow fastest during the EAP program, and which changes persist (or shift) once students move into undergraduate study? The figure shows one example—word skipping—across three timepoints. This project was published in Reading and Writing.

DerLex: an eye-tracking database of derived word reading

DerLex is a large open database of eye-tracking data on English derived words (e.g., teacher, permission). It’s designed as a companion to CompLex—our earlier eye-tracking megastudy of English compound words (e.g., goalpost)—so researchers can study two major types of morphological complexity using comparable methods and compatible data structures. This project was published in Behavioral Research Methods.

How “In-Group Positivity” Spreads: Language, Bias, and Cultural Transmission

Why does “us vs. them” show up so reliably in everyday language? In two online experiments (N = 922), we measured the emotional positivity (valence) of the words people used to describe an in-group vs. an out-group—using a large psycholinguistic database to score how positive/negative each word is. We found a consistent in-group positivity boost, especially when the input information about the group was negative, and we showed that this positivity bias can propagate across ‘cultural generations’ in a diffusion-chain experiment. This project was published in Nature: Scientific Reports.

Reading Gains that Stick: Greater Reading growth during EAP program, Higher GPAs Later

Universities often run intensive English “bridging” programs for international students who are academically ready, but still building English proficiency. In this project, we tracked 405 students across a 28-week English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program and asked a simple question: Do the reading gains students make before they start university actually matter later on? Using a Random Forests approach plus regression modeling, we found that growth in silent reading fluency (words per minute) was a standout predictor of later undergraduate GPA. Roughly, a 1 SD boost in reading-rate growth (~26 WPM) predicted about a 0.21 increase in GPA. This project was published in Reading and Writing.

Do bridging programs close the reading gap? Eye-tracking evidence from passage reading

Do students with lower incoming reading scores catch up during an English-for-Academic-Purposes (EAP) bridging program—or does the gap stay the same? We tracked 405 Chinese-speaking students across a 28-week program using eye-tracking during passage reading plus comprehension questions. Using incoming IELTS Reading scores as a baseline, we found clear overall improvement in reading efficiency and comprehension—but the growth trajectories were parallel across ability levels, meaning the gap neither widened nor closed (a stable change pattern). This project was published in Bilingualism: Language & Cognition

Publications

See all publications

Daniel Schmidtke, Gwenyth Lu, Anna L. Moro (2025). EAL reading growth during and beyond an undergraduate transition program: a 4-year longitudinal eye-movement study. In Reading and Writing.

Journal link

Daniel Schmidtke, Julie A. Van Dyke, Victor Kuperman (2025). DerLex: An eye-movement database of derived word reading in English. In Behavior Research Methods.

Journal link

Daniel Schmidtke, Seina Yamada, Anna L. Moro (2025). Bridging to academic success: the impact of reading gains in an English bridging program on GPAs. In Reading and Writing.

Journal link

See all publications

Teaching

I have taught the following courses at McMaster University:

Laboratory in Experimental Linguistics

(2023, 2025, 2026). In this course students collaborate to plan, carrying out, analyze, and report an experiment that addresses a cognitive aspect of language processing.

Statistics for Language Research

(2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2026). An introductory course to statistical methods custom-tailored to the needs of language researchers. This course provides an introduction to R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

Computers and Linguistic Analysis

(2018, 2020, 2021, 2024, 2025). This course studies computational tools and techniques of language processing using large electronic collections of texts. Students are trained in basic text-processing, statistical and programming skills using R.

The Art of Leadership

(2017). This course offers senior undergraduate students the opportunity to participate in a learning-centred leadership program, involving peer-to-peer mentoring of students in the MELD program. The course provides up-front and on-going training and development in active leadership and mentorship.

Skills

R

R, Shiny, ggplot, Markdown

Statistics

LMER, longitudinal analysis, growth curve modeling

Teaching and learning

Evidence-informed pedagogy

Behavioral research

Programming: EyeLink, PsychoPy, Java, DMDX; Platforms: Pavlovia, Inquisit, GitLab, Amazon Turk, DMDX

Collaborators

Line thickness corresponds to the number of co-authorships. Collaborators

Media

An article about my current work at the MELD program at McMaster University

A selection of news articles related to our Twitter study:

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