Psychology

Pew Teaching Excellence Award 2001

Pew Teaching with Technology Award 2011

Cognitive, Psycholinguistics/Applied Cognition

PSY 101 - Introductory Psychology
PSY 101 - Honors Introductory Psychology
PSY 357 - Psychology of Language
PSY 365 - Cognition
HNR 313 - Honors Junior Seminar: Language in Cognitive Science

My research examines the cognitive processes that support skilled reading, with particular attention to how readers represent the sound structure of written language—from syllables, onsets, and rimes to the stress, rhythm, phrasing, and intonation patterns that give a sentence its shape. Although we often think of reading as silent, skilled readers construct an “inner voice” that carries these patterns. That inner voice does important work: it helps readers group words into meaningful units, resolve ambiguity, and remember what they have read. Because English spelling marks stress and rhythm only partially, much of a text’s prosodic structure must be inferred by the reader.

A central question in my work is whether prosodic sensitivity can be strengthened through instruction. Drawing on cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and literacy research, my collaborators and I design and test interventions that make stress and rhythm more visible on the page through orthographic markers, guided practice, and feedback. We then ask whether readers carry those gains into ordinary text.

This question has practical stakes. Literacy difficulties affect many adolescents and adults, and I am especially interested in approaches that are scalable and evidence-based. By making the sound structure of language more accessible to the eye, this work aims to deepen our understanding of skilled reading and inform interventions that can strengthen it across diverse readers.

My current projects turn these questions into specific empirical work. One line asks how lexical stress and rhythm operate during skilled reading—in particular, whether stress patterns become stored as part of a word’s lexical representation while rhythm is computed more dynamically from the surrounding sentence. A second line compares native and nonnative readers of English, examining where their use of stress, rhythm, and phrasing converges and where it diverges.

A third, more applied line develops digital measures and training tools that make prosodic structure visible on screen, so that readers, students, and researchers can see how stress, rhythm, phrasing, and intonation shape meaning in written text.

Gross, J., Roldan, M., Kiessel, T., Esselink, M., & Dunlap, L. (2026). Training with orthographic stress and rhythm markers improves adult readers' prosodic sensitivity. Reading and Writing. Advance online publication. 

Gross, J., Winegard, B., Plotkowski, A. R., (2018). Marking stress exPLICitly in written English fosters rhythm in the reader's inner voice. Reading Research Quarterly.  

Gross, J., Millett, A.L., Bartek, B., Bredell, K.H., Winegard, B. (2014). Evidence for prosody in reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 49(2), 189-208. 

Gross, J., Treiman, R., & Inman, J. (2000). The role of phonology in a letter detection task. Memory & Cognition, 28, 349–357. 

Treiman, R., Fowler, C. A., Gross, J., Berch, D., & Weatherston, S. (1995). Syllable structure or word structure? Evidence for onset and rime units with disyllabic and trisyllabic stimuli. Journal of Memory and Language, 34(1), 132–155.