Dr Elisabeth (Lisi) Beyersmann is a cognitive scientist with an interest in how the human mind processes words, with a particular focus on units that carry meaning (“morphemes”). Besides her focus on rapid, automatic reading mechanisms in adults, she is also interested in how children learn to read, when during reading development word processing becomes more intuitive and automatized, and how reading and word retrieval skills change within the ageing population.

Click here for more detail and updates on her lab activites.

Education

Dr Beyersmann completed a Bachelor of Science with a major in Computational Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 2003.

She then commenced a Master of Science degree at the University of Stuttgart in 2003, while shifting her research focus to Psycholinguistics. Her Masters project was hosted by the University of Cambridge, UK, where she spent most of 2005. She used the recordings of event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate rapid, spoken language processing in the brain, and completed her degree in 2006.

In 2007, Dr Beyersmann moved to Australia to undertake a PhD in Cognitive Science at Macquarie University. Since then, her work has primarily focused on understanding how children and adults rapidly read words that contain multiple morphemes (e.g. un-pack-ing) using experimental methods such as lexical decision and masked priming, EEG, MEG, and eye-tracking.

Employment

Following her PhD, Dr Beyersmann was awarded four consecutive internationally competitive research fellowships which allowed her to carry out several years of in-depth research in the field of reading and reading acquisition.

She spent 3.5 years (2013-2016) as a postdoctoral research fellow within the Cognitive Psychology Laboratory (LPC) at Aix-Marseille University, France, which was funded by the award of an internationally competitive full-time FYSSEN Foundation research fellowship (2 years), followed by a prestigious Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship from the Brain & Language Research Institute (1.5 years).

In October 2016, she moved back to Australia to take up a 3-year full-time Macquarie University Research Fellowship (MQRF, 2016-2018), followed by a a 3-year full-time ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA, 2019-2022).

Dr Beyersmann is currently employed as a Senior Lecturer within the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University. 

If you are interested in doing a Master of Research or PhD, reach out to Dr Beyersmann directly ([email protected]) or apply for an International Doctorate for Experimental Approaches to Language and Brain (IDEALAB).