Paris Gappmayr
PhD Candidate
Research Assistant
Paris Gappmayr is a PhD candidate in the Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences program studying sign language perception and acquisition. She is affiliated with the Wheelock Deaf Center through her work as a research assistant in the Language Acquisition & Visual Attention (LAVA) Lab and is mentored by Dr. Amy Lieberman.
Paris’ dissertation investigates the factors that guide where and when sign perceivers look during sign perception. Using eye-tracking technology, she compares the role of sign type (lexical signs vs. fingerspelled words) and familiarity (novel vs. familiar), as well as the presence vs. absence of facial expressions and signer cues. on gaze patterns while perceiving signed input.
In her previous work, Paris has studied how deaf children learn to allocate their gaze in order to perceive signed input, and whether parents modify signs during child-directed signing to emphasize their iconicity. Her work has been published in Frontiers of Psychology.
Pronouns: she/her
Education
BA, Speech Sciences (Honours), University of British Columbia
AA, Thompson Rivers University
Selected Publications
Gappmayr, P. & Lieberman, A. (2024). Deaf signers allocate gaze based on type and familiarity of signed input. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Gappmayr, P., & Lieberman, A. (2023). The alignment of deaf children's gaze with parent ASL input. Proceedings of the 47th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, ed. Paris Gappmayr & Jackson Kellogg. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Gappmayr, P., Lieberman, A., Pyers, J., Caselli, N. (2022). Do parents modify child-directed signing to highlight iconicity? Frontiers in Psychology. 13-2022. 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.920729.
Selected Presentations
Gappmayr, P. & Lieberman, A. " Deaf signers allocate gaze based on type and familiarity of signed input". Poster presented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024) in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Gappmayr, P. & Lieberman, A. "The development of deaf children’s eye gaze patterns". Poster presented at the American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA) conference, November 2023
Gappmayr, P. & Lieberman, A. “The alignment of deaf children’s gaze with parent ASL input”. Poster presented at the 47th Boston University Conference on Language Development, November 2022.
Gappmayr, P., Lieberman, A. “Iconicity in child-directed signing: A naturalistic corpus evaluation”. Poster presented at the 14th Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR) conference, September 2022 (Osaka, Japan).