Our Main Research Areas

We are interested in various different aspects of psycholinguistics, with a particular focus on learning to read. Broadly, we work on two sets of problems, individual words and comprehension.

Some of our research is investigating how children learn to deal with words. Children make massive progress in reading during their first few years at school. How do they learn to read words and what are the cognitive processes that enable them to move from slow and effortful reading at 5 or 6 years of age to fluent reading just a few years later?

Some of our other research projects are tackling reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is hugely complex. To understand text, children need to do more than recognise or read aloud individual words. They need to retrieve word meanings and integrate them with the material being read, and use background knowledge to make inferences.

Uniting all our work is a concern with understanding learning processes themselves, rather than just measuring the end point of learning. We use a range of different methodologies, and bring together large scale corpus analyses and an experimental approach.

 

Click here for recent publications.

Current and Recent Projects

Book Language: Promoting Literacy and Oracy in the Early Years via Structured Experience with Written Language

Parents and caregivers are encouraged to read with their children from an early age. But what do children gain from these shared book-reading experiences? The aim of this research project, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, is to explore what is unique about the language of children’s books and how it differs from everyday spoken conversation, and to measure what children learn through systematic exposure to ‘book language’ in a shared reading context.

 

Children’s Reading Comprehension Difficulties: Taking the Long View

Using a large-scale longitudinal dataset, this project identifies why some children struggle to understand what they read, and what the longer-term consequences of these comprehension problems might be.

 

DPhil Projects

The DPhil research students in our lab are working on a range of projects related to reading and language learning. Current projects include children's sensitivity to morphology as they recognise words (Mohen), print exposure in second language processing (Sean), statistical learning of graphotactic patterns (Nicole), emotion words and the sentiments of children's writing (Rainy), understanding classifier usage in Mandarin Chinese (Jessie), learning to read in Jamaica (Tonia) and lexical ambiguity in Mandarin (Catherine).  Learn more by clicking on each project or visiting their individual pages under the 'Our Team' tab.

 

Some of our previous research projects can be found on our legacy website. 

 

 

People interested in joining the group are welcome to contact Kate Nation.