My work focuses on the causes and consequences of children’s language and literacy development and is shaped both by fundamental scientific questions and by the concerns of practitioners and policy-makers. My approach to longitudinal research capitalises on the power of statistical modelling to uncover causal relationships, whilst using carefully designed measures to extract key features of the underlying skills. My ongoing funded projects include (i) developing strategies to support children’s vocabulary growth by increasing their independent reading (Reading and Vocabulary) (ii) working with Early Childhood Education Centres and other policy and practice stakeholders in Kenya and Zambia to improve early childhood education and engage families in children’s learning (Home to School).

Email: l.r.shapiro@aston.ac.uk

Telephone: +44 (0) 121 204 4052

Click here for my webpage.

Best book I've read recently: The Butchers by Ruth Gilligan

I am a postdoctoral research fellow based at University of Birmingham and I work on a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust in which I try to find out what we can learn from reading fiction and why some children enjoy reading more than others. For this project, I work together with Prof. Ian Apperly, Dr. Rory Devine, and Prof. Michaela Mahlberg (University of Birmingham) and Dr. Laura Shapiro (Aston University). I have previously worked on the Reading and Vocabulary (RAV) project with Dr. Jessie Ricketts, Dr. Laura Shapiro and Prof. Adrian Burgess. The goal of the project was to track the reading and vocabulary development and reading habits in children as they transfer from primary to secondary school. I’m interested in reading and vocabulary development in children and adolescents. More specifically, in how much we read and what we read influences our vocabulary and reading development.

Email: s.van-der-kleij@aston.ac.uk

Click here for my webpage.

I am a postdoctoral research fellow in Psychology, working on a University funded project investigating how reading promotes high quality vocabulary knowledge. I work together with Dr. Laura Shapiro and Dr. Jo Taylor on this project, using word learning paradigms to experimentally investigate aspects of word learning through reading with adult participants.

Another project I am currently working on with Dr. Laura Shapiro, Dr. Jo Taylor, Dr. Jessie Ricketts, and others focuses on adults with low literacy. The project examines whether phonics courses can improve parents’ reading-related skills and ability to support their children’s reading.

I am interested in how we learn new vocabulary through reading, and the different factors that can affect this process, such as the amount of exposure, spelling-to-sound mappings, and previous language experience.

Email: r.hulme@aston.ac.uk

Click here for my webpage.

I am a lecturer at UCL and my research investigates how we learn to read, in particular how we learn the relationship between a word’s spelling and its sound and meaning. I often use artificial language learning methods, in which participants learn to read made-up words, sometimes written in unfamiliar alphabets. This enables me to simulate what it's like for children learning read words for the first time or how adults learn a foreign language.

I am interested in how different factors affect learning, for example, how difficult the spelling-to-sound relationships are, how meaningful the words are, or the method we use to teach people. I study how well people learn and I also use neuroimaging to look at how the brain represents newly learned words.

Email: joanne.taylor@ucl.ac.uk

Click here for my webpage.

I am a PhD student supervised by Dr. Laura Shapiro, Dr. Jo Taylor, and Prof. Joel Talcott. My research investigates the activity that occurs in the brain when words are heard or seen. I am carrying out a meta-analysis of previous research and I will be conducting studies using fMRI and EEG. For this research, we are collaborating with Dr. Matt Davis, Prof. Adrian Burgess, and Amrita Bains.

Email: gwilliaa@aston.ac.uk

Click here for my webpage.

Click here for my webpage.

Labhpreet Kaur

Mahik Javed