Meet the Team

LULLU Research Team

My research concerns the different cognitive and language-related skills that underpin the development of reading and listening comprehension and the causes of reading comprehension difficulties. I have published numerous papers, chapters, and books in this field. I was elected Vice President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.

Prof. Kate Cain

Professor of Language and Literacy

My research investigates whether grammatical aspect influences children’s pronoun resolution and generation of inferences. I also explore the extent to which individual differences in the influence of verb aspect predict reading comprehension.

Dr. Gillian Francey

Research Associate

I am interested in skills that impact children’s reading and language abilities at different ages throughout primary education. My particular interests are how adults can help children improve their language learning by sharing books with them and instilling a love of stories.

Dr. Daphne Barker

Research Associate

I am interested in variations in language acquisition and factors that can be used to identify children who have a delay in language development. I am also interested in factors that can be recorded early in childhood and whether they can help predict concern for language development over time.

Dr. Lana Jago

Research Associate

My research concerns the effects of shared storybook reading on early language development in typical and atypical populations. My project aims to disentangle which features of printed and digital storybooks maximise word learning in children with neurodevelopmental disorders.

Laura Diprossimo

Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher

I’m interested in the influences of character realism on young children’s understanding of picture book stories. Specifically, I am exploring children’s responses to anthropomorphised characters, in comparison with more realistically depicted human protagonists.

Samantha Russell

Research Associate

I am performing a meta-analysis on the measures of morphological awareness and reading comprehension, and the relationship between them in English. In the next step, I plan to compare those in different languages.

Yazhi Liu

Doctoral Scholar

My research concerns learning about early literacy acquisition through student interactions with research-based game environments. I am working with Amplify Reading to apply and refine statistical models of time-series analysis of early literacy development by looking at children’s interactions with a digital reading support. This project will use data from games that assess vocabulary, morphology, word reading and reading comprehension.

Yawen Ma

Doctoral Scholar

LULLU Affiliates and Friends

I am working to map and understand the dynamics of change in young readers as they progress through a digital reading resource. My research includes methodological and R software development for periodic time series. I have taken up a Chair for Lancashire and East Cumbria RSS Group.

Dr. Anastasia Ushakova

Lecturer in Biostatistics (Health Informatics), Lancaster Medical School

My research interests lie in exploring teachers' knowledge of reading comprehension and identifying causal factors implicated in the effective teaching of reading comprehension. I am a writer and teacher trainer, working as a columnist for the Times Educational Supplement and developing professional learning materials and training programmes on developing literacy and leadership in school.

Megan Dixon

Part-Time Doctoral Scholar (University of Sussex) and School Leader

I am interested in the ways in which we represent and use what we know about others' mental states (termed: theory of mind). I'm fascinated by the variability in theory of mind across individuals, lifespan, and cultures. I lead the Cognition of Social Interaction (CoSI) lab where much of this work is carried out.

Dr. Jessica Wang

Lecturer in Psychology, Lancaster University

My research concerns individual differences in cognition that contribute to variation in language and literacy development in typically and atypically developing children. I am particularly interested in how children use the sound structure of a language (phonemes, prosody) to process spoken and written language. I use a combination of techniques from educational psychology, experimental psychology, psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience in my research.

Dr. Margriet A. Groen

Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Lancaster University

I am interested in the development of inference generation in young children, with a particular emphasis on skills such as memory and vocabulary. I am currently investigating the development of language and literacy skills in school age children.

Dr. Nicola Currie

Senior Research Associate

LULLU Visiting Academics and Scientists

Current

I am an Early Stage Researcher in the e-LADDA ITN and PhD student at the Faculty of Computing at the University of Latvia. I am interested in the impact of different presentation formats on learning in school children. Currently, I am exploring the impact of visually enhanced interfaces on navigation and comprehension of educational texts.

Aisha Futura Tüchler

PhD Student

I am a PhD candidate in Psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and an assistant researcher in the Center for Advanced Research in Education at the Universidad de Chile. My research focuses on understanding the relationship between reading motivation and reading comprehension difficulties in primary education students.

Elvira Jeldrez

PhD Student

I am an early-stage researcher from e-LADDA and PhD student at the University of Seville. I am interested in language development in special or atypical populations. My project primary focus in studying language acquisition in a robot-assisted intervention with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder ASD.

Ana Lucia Urrea Echeverria

PhD Student

I am a member of the Early Language Development in the Digital Age (e-LADDA) network as an Early Stage Researcher and a PhD student at the University of Seville. My current project focuses on vocabulary interventions in the early ages of deaf/hard of hearing individuals. I am generally interested in psycholinguistics research both with behavioral and neurophysiological measures.

Hülya Aldemir

PhD Student

LULLU Research Team

LULLU Affiliates and Friends

LULLU Visiting Academics and Scientists

Current

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LULLU Research Team

LULLU Affiliates and Friends

LULLU Visiting Academics and Scientists

Current

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