Research Overview

I'm interested in individual differences in reading development, in both typically and atypically developing children. My work spans several populations, including children with developmental dyslexia, developmental language disorder, hearing impairments, and Down syndrome.

A central question I pursue is how perception and motor skills contribute to the development of the speech sound representations needed to learn to read, with a particular focus on the roles of audiovisual (speech) processing and sensorimotor control. I'm also interested in how prosody supports reading comprehension.

Beyond speech, I'm interested in the cognitive correlates of reading and writing development more broadly, including the contributions of morphological awareness, working memory and executive functions.

In a somewhat separate strand, I also work on language lateralisation, having contributed to the development of functional Transcranial Doppler Ultrasonography as a direct measure of lateralisation of cognitive functions, and I'm interested in how lateralisation varies across typical and atypical development.

PhD Supervision Interests

Projects for PhD supervision should have a connection to my broader research interests, and I welcome proposals that approach this from a range of angles.My work sits at the intersection of Psychology, Education and Psycholinguistics, and spans several related strands: how individual differences in perceptual, language and cognitive processes (e.g., attention, memory, executive functions) contribute to reading development; the behavioural and neural correlates of language lateralisation; and reading development in atypical populations, including dyslexia, developmental language disorder, Down syndrome, and deaf children.A particular and long-standing interest of mine is how children use the sound structure of their mother tongue (at the phoneme level or in terms of prosody) to process spoken or written language. A more specific idea for a PhD project could focus on whether prosody—the intonation and rhythm of speech—shapes how readers parse written language, much as it helps listeners segment spoken sentences into syntactically and semantically coherent chunks (Carlson, 2009; Cutler et al., 1997). Some have argued that implicit prosody similarly supports comprehension of written text (Fodor, 2002; Webman-Shafran, 2017), and reading prosody has been consistently linked to reading comprehension in developing readers (Veenendaal et al., 2015). This raises open questions about whether and how adult and developing readers draw on prosody when parsing written sentences, which could be explored using psycholinguistic and/or electrophysiological methods.