Previous PhD Students
Dave completed his PhD entitled ‘Combining behavioral and neurolinguistic methodologies to investigate Spanish scalar indefinites among mono- and bilinguals: an event-related potential study’ with Prof. Jason Rothman in 2017. He is now an Assistant Professor in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Vince completed his PhD examining the effects of bilingual language experience on brain structure and function under the supervision of Dr Christos Pliatsikas and Prof. Jason Rotham in 2018. After completing a postdoc at the University of Birmingham, he’s now a Professor at the University of Tromsø.
Eloi completed his PhD entitled ‘Polarity in L3 English: The Initial Stages and Beyond’ under the supervision of Prof. Jason Rothman and Dr Ian Cunnings in 2019. After completing an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Southampton, he now is a member of academic staff at King’s College London.
Dr Toms VoitsToms completed his PhD thesis entitled ‘Bilingualism as a Neuroprotective Factor in Ageing: Insights from Healthy and Clinical Populations’ under the supervision of Dr Christos Pliatsikas. He is now a Postdoctoral Researcher working at the University of Gothenburg.
Dr Yesi Cheng
(University of Sheffield, UK)
Yesi completed his PhD on ‘Sentence processing in English natives and non-natives: Evidence from attachment resolution and agreement processing’ with Dr Ian Cunnings and Prof. Jason Rothman in 2021. He subsequently trained in speech and language therapy and is now a practising Speech and Language Therapist.
Adel completed his PhD on ‘The nature of the bilingual lexicon: Investigating cross-language priming and its predictors’ with Prof. Jason Rothman, Dr Ian Cunnings and Prof. Ludovica Serratrice. He is now a Research Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Dr Emily Wright
Emily completed her PhD in Clinical Language Sciences on ‘Spoken language multilingualism in deaf children’ under the supervision of Prof. Ludovica Serratrice and Prof. Vesna Stojanovik in 2023. After completing her PhD, she now works as a Research Officer for the Stroke Association.
Dr Shatha AlaskarShatha completed her PhD on second language sentence processing with Dr Ian Cunnings in 2023. Her PhD research focused on the processing of subject-verb agreement and reflexive anaphors in first and second language speakers. She now works at Majmaah University in Saudia Arabia.
Alex completed his PhD on how bilingualism influences cognition and brain function with Dr Christos Pliatsikas in 2024. His PhD research in particular examined bilingualism as a continuum of experiences. He now works as a Research Fellow in the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics at Reading.
Debra completed her PhD on how the Young Interpreter Scheme influences development of metalinguistic awareness under the supervisor of Professor Ludovica Serratrice. She now works as a Lecturer in the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading, UK.
Previous Postdocs and Visiting Scholars
Fatih completed his PhD in Educational and Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University and worked as a postdoc at the University of Reading between 2016-2018. He is now a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Lancaster, UK.
Jorge completed his PhD in bilingual morphological processing at the University of the Basque country in Spain. He worked as a postdoc in the Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Lab here at Reading in 2016 and is now a Principal Investigator at Universidad Nebrija, Spain.
Anamaria completed a postdoc funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation examining the acquisition of wh- dependencies in Romanian-English bilingual children. She is now a Research Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, working with Prof. Theo Marinis.
While Anna was with the lab, she worked as the Public Engagement Officer for the Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism with Prof. Ludovica Serratrice. She then trained to be a Speech and Language Therapist on the Speech and Language Therapy MSc programme here at Reading.
Hiroki completed his PhD on native and non-native sentence processing in 2019 with Dr Ian Cunnings. He then continued working on native and non-native sentence processing as a postdoc in the lab. He is now a DFG-funded Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Potsdam.
Alessandra completed her PhD in the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences in 2017. She the worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Professor Ludovica Serratrice on a project on listening comprehension in bilingual children. She is now a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Greenwich.
Dr Arthur Chen works at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in Nanjing, China. He visited the lab in the 2024/25 academic year as a Visiting Scholar funded by the China Scholarship Council to complete a project on second language acquisition and sentence processing.
Previous Academic Staff
Professor Jason Rothman helped setup the Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Lab during his time in the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading. He is now a Distinguished Professor in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Lancaster, UK.
Professor Ludovica Serratrice worked in the lab on language development and multilingualism in during her time at the University of Reading. She is now a Senior Academic Research Leader in Multilingualism and Inclusive Education in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford, UK.
