Meet the team
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Caroline Rowland is a Professor at the University of Liverpool
and Director of Language Development at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She leads the Language 0-5 Project and has worked on language development since graduating as a psychologist in 1993. She has two children who are grown up and who have been very patient with her attempts to study their language development. You can contact her at: crowland@liverpool.ac.uk 
Heather Turnbull has been working at the Language Lab on a
range of projects including Language 0-5, Language0-6 and Word Learning. During her PhD she will be looking at whether babies can learn sounds which appear together in speech, and whether they can use this knowledge to learn words. Her studies will be for 8 to 12 month olds and will use the eye-tracker as this is a really great way to help find out which sounds infants like to listen to the most. You can contact her at: H.J.Turnbull@liverpool.ac.uk Claire Noble is a Research Associate at the University of Liverpool. She completed her PhD here in 2009 and has been working on language development ever since. She is part of the ‘Reading Together’ project team who are looking at how shared book reading can support language development. She is also working with our partners at Beanstalk to evaluate their ‘Story Starters’ programme in local preschools. You can contact her at: ps0u3151@liverpool.ac.uk |
Michelle Peter is a Research Associate at the University of Liverpool and completed her PhD in child language acquisition here in April 2015. She has always been interested in how children manage the tricky business of learning language, and is even more so now that she has a toddler herself! In particular she is interested in learning what aspects during the first years of a baby’s life are important for language development, and how this relates to their performance at school later on. You can contact her at: Michelle.Peter@liverpool.ac.uk Samantha Durrant is a Research Associate at the University
of Liverpool. She completed her PhD in language development and accents at Plymouth University, and is passionate and enthusiastic about how children develop language. She has two young boys and is fascinated to watch how their accents have changed over time since moving to Liverpool. You can contact her at: sdurrant@liverpool.ac.uk Julian Pine is a Professor at the University of Liverpool. His
research focuses on how children learn grammar and morphology in different languages, and on using computer models to understand how differences in the pattern of errors shown by children learning different languages are related to the characteristics of the language that they are learning. You can contact him at: jpine@liverpool.ac.uk |
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Ben Ambridge is a Professor at the University of Liverpool.
His research investigates children's first language acquisition, mostly using judgement and production methodologies. He is particularly interested in children's overgeneralization errors (e.g., *The joked giggled him). He also studies children's acquisition of morphology, focusing particularly on Optional Infinitive errors in English (e.g., *He play ) and agreement/case-marking errors in morphologically rich languages, specifically Polish, Finnish and Lithuanian. Ben also writes popular science - his book, Psy-Q, introduces readers to interesting findings from the Psychology literature by means of interactive tests, games, illusions and quizzes. You can contact him at: ambridge@liverpool.ac.uk Anna’s research interests focus on what helps babies to
learn. Specifically during her PhD she will be finding out about why learning words is so important to babies and whether learning these words helps them to remember the objects around them. Anna’s studies will be for 6-9 month olds, and will mainly be using our eye tracker. By using the eye tracker she can find out lots about whether infants from an early age can follow and remember objects they have seen. You can contact her at: hlabrow8@liverpool.ac.uk |
Lewis Ball is a second year demonstrator and PhD student at
the University of Liverpool. His research looks at understanding how infants learn new words using electroencephalography (EEG). EEG is a technique which measures the electrical activity produced in the brain whilst participants engage in some sort of task. In Lewis' experiments he uses EEG to detect signs of learning when children are taught new words. You can contact him at hllball2@liverpool.ac.uk Hannah Sawyer is a first year PhD student at the University
of Liverpool. Her PhD will look at how children learn to use verbs correctly and whether the input they hear from their parents can influence this process. Hannah’s studies will be for a children of a variety of ages, and both typically developing children and children with language problems. She will ask them to complete a variety of language games such as sentence repetition and sentence completion tasks. You can contact her at hshsawy2@liverpool.ac.uk |
