Rachael Lapidis, M.A.

Rachael Lapidis has always been interested in language, psychology, and music. As a graduate student in the laboratory of renowned scientist Dr. Diana Deutsch, Rachael combined these three domains, examining pitch memory, musical illusions, and linguistic pitch and rhythm in speakers of lexical tone languages and English.  Some of this work has been recently published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Prior to her graduate work, Rachael served as the laboratory manager of Dr. Laura-Ann Petitto’s Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory for Language and Child Development at Dartmouth College where she was involved in several national studies of bilingual children’s language and literacy.  Rachael graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College in 2004 as a Presidential Scholar with a double major in Psychology and Linguistics.  She presented her linguistics thesis work at two national conferences and at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Barcelona.  She studied voice with Erma Mellinger and performed with the Dartmouth Chamber Singers for five years, including a tour of Japan in 2002, and currently sings with the La Jolla Symphony Chorus, with whom she will be making her Carnegie Hall debut in May 2012.

Rachael taught Psychology of Music at Chapman during the fall semester of 2009 and has taught Introduction to Psychology and Psychological Disorders of Childhood at the University of California, San Diego. Rachael currently serves as the Graduate Coordinator of the Psychology Department at the University of California, San Diego.

She will be teaching Psychology of Music at Chapman during the fall semester, 2011.