Nora Presson , Psychology
4th yr PIER, 4th yr Psych

Advisor: Brian MacWhinney

Nora graduated this past June with a degree in Psychology and Spanish from Carleton College (in Northfield, Minnesota).  She worked on a project looking at the way people use reference in conversation, and her own area of research was (in Psychology) comparing the way Spanish and German speakers categorized nouns by grammatical gender, asking whether the language one speaks influences habitual thought.  Over the course of her undergraduate career, Nora became more and more interested in how people learn second languages, especially in a classroom setting.  Her experience teaching and tutoring Spanish gave Nora some new research questions and the inspiration to join PIER.
Nora's research goal is to make second language teaching more effective, and to encourage the study of second languages in all educational settings.  She is particularly interested in integrating the principles of cognitive psychology, and what is known about learning, memory, and the structure of language, to a base of educational knowledge in order to change language education.

People would be surprised to know that Nora is usually seen with a Diet Coke in hand, and that she enjoys literary translation and translation theory; for her Spanish major, she translated a story by Julio Cortázar ("La puerta condenada") that had never been translated into English.  Also, she won a year's supply of M&M's in the "Find the Impostor M&M" contest a few years back.