I was given the excellent opportunity to present a poster at the 23^rd Annual Meeting of Society for Scientific Studies of Reading (SSSR), which was held in the University of Porto (Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences), Portugal, from the 13^th to 16^th of July. The title of my poster was “Morphology without semantics? The roles of vocabulary knowledge and language exposure in influencing the nature of lexical representations in a rote learning context”.

During the conference, I enjoyed catching up with former schoolmates, and more importantly, making new connections with potential collaborators in Hong Kong and Kuwait. Not only that, attending talks, seminars, and posters related to my work have further inspired me in terms of my current work as well as future research directions. Last, presenting my work to other researchers not only gave me an opportunity to practise communicating my findings to an audience, but it also allowed me to learn from other researchers who were so helpful in giving suggestions about how to analyse my data, specifically certain R codes for data cleaning as well as further pairwise comparisions. I am excited to implement these suggestions in my work!

Overall, it was a very productive and beneficial time for me at the conference. The conference was very well-organised with student volunteers who were always ready to help conference attendees. The lovely sunny weather in Porto certainly helped a lot! I strongly encourage graduate students who are interested in research on literacy, language acquisition, reading, writing, spelling, etc. to attend this conference in the future.

Written by Siti Syuhada Binte Faizal, who is a 3^rd-year PhD student in Speech and Language Sciences.