I’m a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York, UK.

I’m currently PI on an ERC-selected/UKRI-funded (through the Horizon Europe Grant Guarantee Scheme) Starting Grant, entitled Identifying the role of sensorimotor feedback as a mechanism of language learning in the first three years of life, or SENFM, for short. This is a 5-year project involving home-recorded data of families over infants’ first year of vocal development. We are running looking preference and lingual ultrasound experiments at key vocal development milestones during this period. Read more about SENFM here.

My research focuses on early language development, and I’m particularly interested in the transition from babble to speech. I’m also interested in the role of iconicity in early language development, specifically why babies acquire so many onomatopoeia in their early words. My work brings together perspectives from production and perception, with a particular focus on phonological development. My research to-date has used eye-tracking and acoustic analysis to observe infants’ perception of language, alongside the consideration of early vocalizations and the manipulation of prosody in infant communication.