Doctoral Programme in Psycholinguistics
The Psycholinguistic Research community in Edinburgh is internationally recognised as one of the foremost groups working on the psychology of language. Our expertise covers a wide range of topics in comprehension, production and dialogue, from sub-lexical processes to the discourse level. We use a wide range of methodologies, ranging from traditional reaction-time studies, through experiments which measure eye movements to record participants' behaviour when reading text, to analyses of large-scale collections of text aimed at demonstrating some of the statistical regularities to which language users are exposed. We also use a range of tasks to tap into the production of language, from sentence completion tasks to elaborate dialogue 'games'.
In general, Doctoral students would take a one-year MSc followed by 3 years of Doctoral Study. Students who pursue Doctoral research in this area typically take the MSc in Psychology of Language in the first year.
To learn more about opportunities for doctoral study at Edinburgh, feel free to contact any of the staff below, all of whom have interests in Psycholinguistics or visit the Language and Cognition Research Group website:
- Holly Branigan
- Martin Corley
- Morag Donaldson
- Martin Pickering
- Richard Shillcock
- Julia Simner
- Patrick Sturt
Current hot topics for PhD study:
- What role do disfluencies play in language comprehension, and why do we produce them?
- How do speakers change their speech to take addressees into account?
- How do we parse written sentences?
- How is language encoded by the senses?
A selection of recent/current PhD topics in this area:
- Rapid Automised Naming in Dyslexia (Supervisors: Holly Branigan)
- Consequences of disfluencies for listeners' representations of linguistic information (Supervisor: Martin Corley).
- Production and Perception in Second Language acquisition (Supervisor: Holly Branigan)
- Syntactic Priming, eye-movements and language production (Supervisor Martin Pickering)
- Modelling language and reading (Supervisor: Richard Shillcock)
- What can the condition of synaesthesia tell us about language processing? (Supervisor: Julia Simner)
- Time course of dependency formation in Turkish sentence processing (Supervisor: Patrick Sturt)
For further information, contact the Programme Secretary, Toni Noble or, to discuss academic matters, contact the Programme Director, Martin Corley.
