PhD Supervision Interests

In my work I have focussed particularly on how children use the sound structure of their mother tongue (either at the phoneme level or in terms of prosody) to process spoken or written language. Projects for PhD supervision should have a connection to that main area of interest. Specifically, a project could focus on the following topics: The role of speech production skills and their interaction with speech perception in the development of speech sound representations (phonology) in young children. Investigating associations with individual differences in early word learning and early literacy skills would be of great interest. How infants or children use prosody to learn new words/syntax and/or to comprehend oral and/or written language. More generally, I'd be happy to (co)-supervise projects on how individual differences in cognition (i.e., attention, memory and learning) contribute to variation in language and literacy development in typically and atypically developing primary school children.