It feels like a good moment to share a few updates from the past few weeks.
First, I started a new role at Aston University on 12 January. I’m now a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Prize Fellow (tenure-track) in the Institute of Health and Neurodevelopment. I’ll be building an independent research programme focused on different aspects of word learning through reading - more on that in due course :)
There have also been a couple of recent paper acceptances. One introduces a new battery measuring print experience in UK primary school children (in press in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology; preprint and materials here). The other, just published in Journal of Memory and Language, uses a compositional distributional semantic model to examine what readers can learn about individual morphemes through reading (link). These mark the final two papers from my postdoc in the Rastle Lab at RHUL, which makes it feel like that chapter has now (nicely) come to a close…
I’ll be presenting the modelling work from the JML paper at TeaP in Tübingen in March, and again at SSSR in Rotterdam in July. The TeaP talk will be part of a symposium on computational modelling in psycholinguistics, and the SSSR talk will be part of a symposium (which I’m co-organising) on learning and teaching morphemes. As part of that symposium, a co-author will also present some very new collaborative work on bound stems, which I’m very excited about.
Finally, a really lovely piece of news: I was named Researcher of the Month by Tooled Up Education, an organisation that provides evidence-based resources for parents and educators. I gave a webinar for them in November on the power of reading, and the accompanying article (that they wrote based on that webinar) is freely available here. It’s been a genuine pleasure working with the Tooled Up Education team, and I’m very grateful for the experience!
That’s probably enough updates for now - more soon!