Research in this group examines various aspects of semantic, pragmatic, morphological and syntactic understanding. Research questions on healthy populations include the role of executive functions in successful language use and communication, how language influences attentional processes and perspective taking, and anomaly detection in reading. Work on developmental populations examines issues such as how children learn to understand and produce sentences in their own language, and how they learn conversational conventions and self-repair. Research in this group also examines developmental disorders of communication, including Autism Spectrum disorders and dyslexia. Research also focuses on brain structural and functional correlates of grammatical processing and also includes the study of bilingual acquisition and processing.
This research group has links with researchers in the School of European Culture and Languages, as part of the Centre for Language and Linguistics.
Recent publications
Pliatsikas, C., Johnstone, T., & Marinis, T. (2014). Grey matter volume in the cerebellum is related to processing of grammatical rules in a second language: a structural VBM study. The Cerebellum, 13(1), 55-63.
Pliatsikas, C., Wheeldon, L., Lahiri, A., & Hansen, P.C. (2014). Processing of zero-derived words in English: An fMRI investigation. Neuropsychologia. 53, 47-53.
Breheny, R., & Ferguson, H.J., & Katsos, N. (2013). Taking the epistemic step: Toward a model of on-line access to conversational implicatures. Cognition, 126, 423-440.
Ferguson, H. J. (2012). Eye movements reveal rapid concurrent access to factual and counterfactual interpretations of the world, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65(5), 939-961.
Douglas, K.M., & Sutton, R.M. (2010). By their words ye shall know them: Language abstraction and the likeability of describers. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 366-374.
Dittmar, M., Abbot-Smith, K., Lieven, E.V. M. , & Tomasello, M. (2008). Young German children’s early syntactic competence: a preferential-looking study. Developmental Science, 11, 575-582.
Dittmar, M., Abbot-Smith, K., Lieven, E.V.M., & Tomasello, M. (2008). German children’s comprehension of word order and case marking in causative sentences. Child Development, 79, 1152-1167.
Forrester, M.A. & Cherrington, S. (2009). The development of other-related conversational skills: A case study of conversational repair during the early years. First Language, 29, 167-192.
Gerken, L. A., Wilson, R., Gómez, R. L., & Nurmsoo, E. (2009). The relation between morpho-syntactic analogies and syntactic categories. In J. Blevins & J. Blevins (eds.). Analogy in grammar: Form and acquisition. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Nurmsoo, E., & Bloom, P. (2008). Preschoolers’ perspective-taking in word learning: Do they blindly follow eye gaze? Psychological Science, 19, 211-215.