Christina L. Gagné received her PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997 and is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada. The aim of her research is to understand how conceptual knowledge affects the way people use and process language. In particular, her work focuses on the underlying conceptual structures that are involved in the interpretation of novel phrases and compounds. Her past work has shown that knowledge about the relations that are used to combine concepts plays an important role in the creation and comprehension of novel noun phrases as well as in the comprehension of compound words.

Professor Thomas L. Spalding (PhD 1994, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) has taught at the University of Iowa and the University of Western Ontario and is currently a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta. He has also been Chief Research Scientist for Acumen Research Group. His research interests relate to the issue of how people combine information in the course of learning, comprehension, and inference. This overarching interest has led to research on concepts, conceptual combina-tion, and compound word processing, as well as peripheral interests in spatial cognition, conceptual development, and consumer loyalty.