PhD Students
Jinming Zhou (Open Science Framework)
Areas of interest: Psycholinguistics, especially sentence comprehension; Second language acquisition; Bilingualism
PhD Thesis: My PhD project investigates how English first (L1) and second language (L2) speakers process language similarly and differently, integrating both systematic reviews and experimental studies. Specifically, it examines the processing of ambiguous relative clauses and agreement violations using eye-tracking and offline comprehension measures. The project also explores the role of individual differences (e.g., lexical automaticity, L2 proficiency) in language comprehension.
Xinyu Liu
Areas of interest: Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, Bilingualism, Brain Ageing
PhD Thesis: My PhD project is about long-term effects of bilingualism on ageing brain. The project utilises the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) datasets accessed through Dementias Platform UK (DPUK). The neuroimaging data, especially the resting-state MEG data will be analysed, combining with demographic information of participants to solve the research questions.
Debra Page (ResearchGate, Google Scholar)
Areas of Interest: Bi/multilingualism, English as an Additional Language, primary and secondary education, child development, peer mentoring, peer brokering.
PhD Thesis: My PhD project is an evaluation the Young Interpreter Scheme (YIS). The Young Interpreter Scheme is an award-winning scheme created by Hampshire Ethnic Minority and Traveller Advisory Service – the Collaborative Partner in this project. The specific mission of the YIS is to facilitate the transition to school for children who are new to English, i.e. novice EAL (English as an Additional Language) learners. Their role is to act as mentors to novice EAL learners in everyday school activities. The scheme has now been adopted throughout the UK in more than 800 primary and secondary schools. This is the first time the successful scheme will be systematically evaluated since it began 10 years ago. The aims are to 1) address the impact of the YIS on related educational and linguistic levels (language use, empathy and intercultural awareness) and 2) collect survey information from teachers and other school staff about their experience of the YIS.
Tamara Schmidt (ResearchGate)
Areas of Interest: Pragmatics, Language acquisition Child language development, Speech Acts, Psycholinguistics
PhD Thesis: My PhD thesis explores various aspects of communicative-pragmatic development that become evident in the production of speech acts. This exceeds verbal behaviour and linguistics, and includes nonverbal and paraverbal behaviour as well as cognitive and social-emotional skills. In a cross-sectional descriptive study the relationships between the above developmental areas will be explored in 2-3-year-old English-speaking children to inform developmental trajectories of the multi-facetted area of pragmatic development.
