Professor Emeritus at University of Maryland, College Park
Email: williamshall@rcn.com
During his career, Professor Hall has made contributions to two different but related fields in Psychological Science, developmental psycholinguistics and comparative neuroscience. His work in recent years in comparative neuroscience addressed a fundamental issue in Psychology and Biology: How do individuals who learn their communication sounds use the information in auditory stimuli to provide feedback for vocal learning? Using a small parrot (the Budgerigar) as a model system, he explored this question by mapping brain pathways interconnecting the auditory system with vocal control areas and other brain areas, employed the method of lesioning of putative pathways needed for providing auditory feedback to test hypotheses concerning the role of these pathways and, most recently used gene expression techniques to evaluate the responsiveness of neurons in the brain to species-typical sounds and other sounds.
Courtesy of: University of Maryland, Department of Psychology
Selected Publications
- A Developmental Investigation of Standard and Nonstandard English among black and white children (Hall, Freedle, 1973)
- Story Recall in Young Black and White Children: Effects of Racial Group Membership, Race of Experimenter, and Dialect (Hall, Reder & Cole, 1975)
- Testing for Competence: Changing the Criterion Part One (Hall & Pratt, Working Paper, 1976)
- Testing for Competence: Changing the Criterion Part Two (Pratt & Hall, Working Paper, 1976)
- Variations in young children’s use of language: Some effects of setting and dialect. In Discourse production and comprehension. (Hall, Cole, Reder, & Dowley [McNamee], 1977)
- Situational Variability in the Speech of Preschool Children (Cole, Dore, Hall & Dowley [McNamee], 1978)
- The Communicative Environment of Young Children: Social Class, Ethnic, and Situational Differences (Hall & Tirre, Technical Report No. 129, 1979)
- Continuity/discontinuity in the function and use of language (Guthrie & Hall, 1983)
- Spoken words, effects of situation and social group on oral word usage and frequency. L. Erlbaum Associates (Hall, Nagy, Linn, & Bruce, 1984).
- Contextual Constraints on Usage of Cognitive Words (Hall, Kofsky Scholnick, & Hughes, 1987)
- Reading Comprehension (Hall, 1989)
Back to People Directory
