Research Interests

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, particularly the development of phonology through novel word learning in both monolingual and bilingual adults and children.

She is currently working 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 works 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 carrying out her independent project with Professors Patrick Rebuschat, Padraic Monoghan and Susana Correia on the interaction of phonological knowledge and mode of practice in second language word learning.