Profile

Sophie Bennett studied her BA in Linguistics with Spanish and MA in Phonetics and Phonology at the University of York. The dissertation for her MA was supervised by Professor Marilyn Vihman and Dr Eleanor Chodroff and comprised a cross-linguistic corpus study of early word learning through usage-based versus UG-based analytical methods. Her research interests lie in language acquisition and bilingualism.

She worked as a Research Assistant on a British Academy-funded project at Lancaster University on the acquisition of Portuguese in children living in the UK, who speak Portuguese at home as a heritage language. She also worked for Dr Bahar Köymen at the University of Manchester's Child Study Centre as part of the LuCiD network, researching the development of young children's critical reasoning skills.

She is part of Lancaster University's Language Learning Research Lab group and is currently studying her PhD in Linguistics at Lancaster University, supervised by Professors Patrick Rebuschat, Padraic Monaghan (Lancaster University), Cristina Flores (University of Minho) and Dr Cátia Verguete (Camões Institute). She holds an Economic and Social Research Council CASE Studentship and studies the effects of individual differences on bilingualism, partnered with the Camões Institute.