Meet the scientists!

I’m a developmental psychologist, which means I research how people develop certain behaviours. Developmental psychologists can be interested in how behaviours change at any age, but most study children.

I’m interested in understanding how children learn language. Much of my current work focuses on discovering which sounds in speech are most important to listen to if you want to learn to read. You may think that since you use your eyes to read and not your ears that you don’t need to listen to sounds in speech at all. In fact psychologists have known for some time that your ability to read comes from learning how letters relate to spoken sounds. It is this ability that allows children and adults to read words that they have never seen before, by sounding them out. Unfortunately English doesn’t make reading particularly easy, as we have words that don’t fit any simple rules. For example you know that the ‘-int’ in mint, tint, flint, glint are all said the same way, but the ‘-int’ in pint is said differently.

One of the questions I have been trying to answer is how we store the sounds of speech in our brains. Every time we say a word we say it slightly differently, so it is difficult to understand how we know that quite different sounds represent the same word. As we get older the way that adults talk to us changes and so the sounds that we use to understand language also change. I’m sure you’ve all noticed how you speak to babies in a very different way to other people your own age, this is called ‘motherese’ or ‘parentese’. The rhythmic pattern in your voice when you speak to babies is very important in helping them learn to speak. Although you have probably never noticed it, speech doesn’t have pauses in it like the spaces between words in sentences, so the rhythmic patterns in language are one way babies can decide when one word ends and another one starts. We’ve found that listening to changes in sounds present in the rhythmic patterns of speech (called prosody) also seem to be important for learning to read.  

Chemists can’t ask elements how they’re involved in chemical reactions, but I could ask children how they store words in their brains and what sounds they use to decide what words they hear, but unfortunately they don’t know. Because we learn to speak without much effort, we need to find ways to study how language develops that doesn’t involve just asking children what they think. The technique I use is to measure electrical activity produced by the brain using a cap placed on the head; this is called EEG (electroencephalography). When your brain is working normally you are thinking about loads of things at the same time, so we present children with experiments where they listen to speech or sound changes lots of times. The differences in brain activity that happen when you’re reacting to a sound must be because of your brain doing that task rather than anything else, because all the other things you’re thinking about change throughout the experiment.

As a lecturer my time is split between teaching university students and working on research. As I’m sure your teacher will tell you, teaching isn’t just about the time in the classroom, but the time it takes to prepare all the work for class. A typical day will often involve some teaching related activity including marking or supervision.

Teaching university students requires you to spend time learning about the most recent developments in the areas you teach and this greatly benefits your research. If you don’t know much about what has been done before, then it is difficult to know what questions still need answering.

When I’m not teaching I work on research projects with my students. During term time I meet with all my research students at least once a week to discuss how their projects are going. Days when I am not meeting with my students we keep in contact by email. Many of my students need to learn how to use the technology that measures children’s electrical brain activity, so I still spend a lot of time in the lab training people.

The most important part of research is writing-up and presenting the results of your experiments, either for other scientists or the general public. This means that most days require analysing data and writing something about the work I am doing. Sometimes I even travel to present my work at conferences to other scientists. So I can be away from the office for periods of time. Of course the research doesn’t stop while I’m away, so email and Skype allow me to keep in contact with my students.

One of my favourite hobbies is illustration and I’ve only recently started using my illustrations in my lectures. I would love to create a series of animated movies to explain the studies that we run with children. The money would allow me design the animation and visit several schools to get feedback on the best way to present the animation and discuss what makes sense and what doesn’t. Animated movies can be funny and informative, but getting the right balance is difficult and hopefully you will all help me to achieve this.

This is one thing that I would like to do, but don’t be afraid to suggest other ideas if you think there are more important things I should do with the money.