People
Academic Staff
Professor Anna Theakston
Director of the Manchester Child Study Centre, and co-Director of the ESRC-funded LuCiD Centre.
My research focuses on children’s language and communicative development in the preschool and early school years, with an emphasis on the interaction between the child and their language environment.
I am interested in early socio-cognitive development, the acquisition of grammatical constructions, inflectional morphology, and the interface between syntax and pragmatics in the development of complex language.
Professor Ben Ambridge
My research focuses on how children learn the grammar of their language; in particular on how they avoid errors with syntax (e.g., “*He giggled me” rather than “He made me giggle”) and morphology (e.g., “*I sitted down” rather than “I sat down”).
Recently, I’ve been branching out from English and studying these phenomena in Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, K’iche’ Mayan, Indonesian, Balinese, Mandarin, Finnish, Polish, Estonian, German, Spanish and Lithuanian. I’m also interested in Open Science (I set up the journal Language Development Research) and pop-psychology: I’ve written two books – Psy-Q and Are You Smarter Than a Chimpanzee – and teach “Psychology in the Real World” on the Psychology BSc programme.
Professor Elena Lieven (Emerita)
Previous co-Director of LuCiD
I have officially retired but continue to take part in research activities: writing papers, giving talks and working with colleagues. My principal areas of research include the emergence and construction of grammar; the relationship between input characteristics and the process of language development; and variation in children’s communicative environments.
View Elena’s research profile. (on here can the following change be made In 2014, the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD) of which Elena was the Centre Director, was established across the Universities of Manchester, Liverpool and Lancaster on a 5-year grant.)
Dr. Leone Buckle
Lecturer in Language and Communicative Development.
I am a Lecturer in Psychology, and I conduct research investigating the role of the environment on children’s cognitive development. My work primarily focuses on how children can learn to produce grammar with adult-like competence through direct experiences of hearing other people speaking across a range of different social contexts. I am also exploring what constitutes good quality representations of ethnic/cultural diversity in children’s literature and how this impacts them.
Dr. Helen Chilton
Senior Lecturer in Deaf Education
I am a Senior Lecturer in Deaf Education. My research has mainly focussed on Theory of Mind and deaf children. This means I am interested in learning about how deaf children understand the thoughts and feelings of other people and themselves. My research has enabled new understandings of how to support deaf children’s ToM through booksharing and in day to day interactions. My recent published work has considered the connection between Theory of Mind skills, deafness and writing.
Dr. Samantha Durrant
Lecturer in Speech and Language Therapy.
I work part-time as a lecturer on the Speech and Language Therapy course and part-time as a post-doctoral researcher in the Child Study Centre. My research is focussed on understanding why some children learn language more quickly than others. The project I am currently working on aims to explore how children’s own curiosity about objects in their environment affects their language development, in particular, learning new words.
View Samantha’s research profile
Dr. Alissa Ferry
Lecturer in Language and Communication Development.
I am a lecturer in Language and Communicative Development. I am mostly interested in cognitive and language development. I study how infants and children break down speech into words and how they then figure out what these words mean. My work often involves trying to see how children learn new words or what they know about words in their own language.
View Alissa’s research profile
Dr. Jenny Freed
Lecturer in Language Disorders
I am a Lecturer in Language Disorders and am a psychologist by background. My key areas of interest are:
- Assessment and development of reading and listening comprehension
- Contribution of skills such as memory and attention to reading/listening comprehension
- Assessment of higher level language skills
- Assessment and development of emotional vocabulary
I work with typically developing children, children who have developmental language disorders and children with autism spectrum disorders.
Dr. Keith Jensen
Senior Lecturer in Comparative and Developmental Psychology.
Humans are unusually social animals. My research investigates the evolution and development of sociality. Taking the jargon away, what this means is that I am curious about why people cooperate so well, what causes cooperation to break down, where moral behaviour comes from and why people share. I am also interested in the dark side of cooperation: when and why do people punish others, why we are so obsessed with fairness, and why we are sometimes spiteful. I go about answering these questions largely by looking at children, to see the early emergence of these social behaviours, and by comparing them to chimpanzees and other social animals to better understand how our sociality evolved.
Dr. Lindsey Jones
Lecturer in Deaf Education
My research considers whether caregivers can be supported to build in the language of, and reasoning about, science into their interactions during daily routines with their deaf or hearing pre-school children. There are three parts to the research:
- Whether caregiver involvement in a home-based science intervention impacts on parental attitudes and behaviours towards science.
- Supporting the Development of Scientific Enquiry and Conceptual Understanding in Science: The Effectiveness of a Home-based Intervention with Deaf and Hearing Pre-school Children.
- Science talk during daily routines between caregivers and children who are deaf and those that are hearing.
View Lindsey’s research profile
Dr. Birsu Kandemirci
Lecturer in Developmental Psychology
I’m a Lecturer in Developmental Psychology. My research mainly focuses on young children’s socio-cognitive skills such as verbal creativity, false-belief understanding, and source-monitoring, and their language abilities such as evidentiality (linguistic declaration of the source of one’s knowledge) skills. I have a particular interest in cross-linguistic research.
Visit Birsu’s research profile
Dr. Bahar Koymen
Senior Lecturer in Developmental Psychology.
My research focuses on the intersection between children’s communicative and socio-cognitive development. I investigate the ways in which young children’s exchange reasons and ideas to arrive at collective decisions which require children to understand their partners’ perspectives in relation to their own perspective.
The specific topics I am interested in involve children’s reasoning and argumentation, children’s social learning (trust in others around them), children’s understanding of common ground (or shared experiences with others), and children’s understanding of social norms (obligations, commitments). I am especially interested in investigating these topics cross-culturally and cross-linguistically.
Dr. Szilvia Linnert
Lecturer in Psychology.
I am a Lecturer in Psychology with an interest in understanding the brain bases of cognitive development. My main approach is to measures brain activity through sensors placed on the scalp (electroencephalography; EEG). I am particularly interested in two main research areas: (1) how visual experience and the development of the visual brain areas aid conceptual understanding and language development; and (2) the underlying brain mechanism of curiosity-driven learning.
View Szilvia’s research profile
Dr. Belen Lopez-Perez
Lecturer in Psychology.
My research is mainly focused on emotion regulation. I am particularly interested in interpersonal emotion regulation, that is, how and why people can shape the emotions of others and the consequences this may entail for their own and others’ emotions, behaviours, and well-being. I investigate this considering different developmental and clinical groups to understand how motives (i.e., reasons for changing emotions) and strategies (i.e., actions to attain the change) may be acquired and how they can be improved.
Dr. Katherine Twomey
Lecturer in Language and Communication Development.
I’m a Lecturer in Language and Communicative Development and teach on the BSc Speech and Language Therapy programme. I’m interested in early cognitive and linguistic development, with a particular focus on the influence of the non-linguistic learning environment on language acquisition. My recent projects have focused on investigating the active role children play in their own learning, and how this curiosity-driven learning interacts with language development. I also collaborate with colleagues in computational modelling and robotics to explore the cognitive mechanisms underlying language development.
View Katherine’s research profile
Dr. Liam Blything
Broadly, Liam’s research aims to reveal the role of different cognitive and language-related skills that underpin children’s understanding for sentence (or discourse) structures that express information about time (e.g., connectives: before, after), causality (e.g., connectives: because, so), and referential relations (e.g., ambiguous pronouns: he, she). His underpinning theoretical framework is to understand how these skills in turn reflect differences in frequency of exposure.
Dr. Nicola Lester
I am a lecturer in Psychology here at the University of Manchester. My research focusses mainly on promoting language learning opportunities for children learning English in addition to another language, and also exploring the impact of ethically diverse (or lack thereof) main characters in children’s literature, on the self-esteem and self-concept of children from such ethnic backgrounds.
Research staff
Dr. Shijie Zhang
I completed my PhD in Linguistics at Lancaster University, which focused on crucial factors influencing relative-clause processing such as discourse context, grammatical weight and information status. Since January 2022, I am working as a postdoctoral research associate with LuCiD on the project: Understanding the factors influencing the comprehension and production of complex sentences. This project will use a range of methods (e.g., corpus analysis, eye tracking, picture selection tasks, and picture description tasks) to understand how children learn to comprehend and produce complex sentences.
View Shijie’s research profile
Dr. Chen Zhao
I am a post-doctoral research associate working on a LuCiD project exploring the effects of home and community language and literacy environment of children from low income families. I completed my PhD at the University of Manchester, which investigated the longitudinal developmental trajectory of infant voice and vocal emotion processing using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). In this project, I also examined the influence of early maternal caregiving behaviour on infants’ neural sensitivity to emotional vocalisations. After achieving my PhD, I worked on the project exploring music and language comprehension and prediction in typically developing children and autistic children. My research interest focuses on children’s language and social emotional development using neuroscience and behavioural tools.
Dr. Owen Waddington
My research broadly focuses on young children’s socio-moral development and moral reasoning. I investigate the ways children come to navigate their social worlds and express their understanding of impartial moral standards. My key areas of interest are:
- Children’s use and understanding of guilt displays
- Children’s sensitivity to moral justifications
- Using novel research paradigms (e.g., posture change to infer children’s emotional responses).
Yarong Gao
I am a Visiting Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UoM during the 2025/26 academic year. I investigate the learnability problems at the syntax-semantics interface, with a particular focus on argument alternations. My current work seeks to identify universal constraints and language-specific factors that shape the acquisition process through rule-based and usage-based learning approaches among native speakers of both Chinese and English, as well as EFL and CSL learners.
PhD students
Senyu Chen
I am a PhD student who completed Bachelor of Science in Psychology and became fascinated about child psychology when working as a research assistant in a lab. I took a gap year afterwards and helped with projects related to parent-child interaction and group helping behaviours. I am interested in the emerging social gestures in infants and how those behaviours could facilitate parent-infant interaction, thus promoting word learning of babies.
Rebecca Hamilton
I recently completed my MSc in Biology studying cooperation and communication of wild bottlenose dolphins through the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the Cedar Key Dolphin Project. For my PhD in Experimental Psychology, I will be investigating the development of motivation to cooperate in human children. In other words, what factors are most important in making children want to cooperate with one another? I will also be comparing cooperation in humans with other species, mainly chimps and dolphins, to examine how cooperative interactions have evolved through time in other highly social species.
Phoebe Walker-Sharpe
With a background in Clinical Linguistics (MSc) and Psychology (PGCert), I am a part-time PhD researcher investigating cognitive explanations of information processing in Neurodivergent populations. My research specifically explores predictive processing and semantic organisation (associative semantics) in Autism Spectrum Conditions. In addition, I am a lecturer in Educational Psychology, teaching on the BSc Educational Psychology and the MEd Psychology of Education Programmes.
View Phoebe’s research profile
Kirstie Hartwell
I am a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Having completed an undergraduate degree in Speech and Language Therapy at the university in 2018, I developed a strong interest in developmental research, and was delighted to join the Child Study Centre to pursue this further. I am primarily interested in children’s socio-cognitive development – for example, how children think, make decisions, and communicate their thoughts to others. As part of my PhD, I am investigating how pre-school children’s reasoning skills develop as they grow.
View Kirstie’s research profile
David Price-Williams
I am studying a part-time PhD investigating Polish children’s acquisition of inflectional morphology. This direction is inspired by my previous MRes that was based on a naturalistic sample of the speech of two Polish children and their caregivers. My interest in language acquisition (from child to adult) goes back to when I began teaching English as a second language in various settings. My key interests centre around constructivist approaches to language acquisition, particularly that of languages that have diverse and inflectionally complex systems.
Charlotte Savill
I study the evolutionary roots of social behaviour, asking how we became who we are today, what we share with other animals, and what sets us apart. My research centres on social cognition, how we think and feel about others, with a particular focus on the balance between cooperation and competition. I take a broad comparative approach to the evolution of sociality, having studied birds, bees, and primates. Children are key to understanding our evolution, as their development reveals how key social skills such as cooperation and fairness take shape. Currently, I investigate social cognition in children and chimpanzees, focusing on communication, deception, and competitive gameplay.
Irem Ozturk Mihci
Before starting my PhD at the University of Manchester, I completed my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Turkey and accumulated my experiences working with children. Additionally, during my academic journey, I worked as a research assistant on collaborative studies involving Boston University and Harvard University.
My research interests are deeply rooted in culture, language, and children’s theory of mind. My current PhD project investigates the linguistic differences between Turkish and English and explores how these differences influence language use among both adults and children.
Gemma Wood
Before beginning my PhD and relocating to Manchester, I completed an MSc in Developmental and Educational Psychology and a BSc in Psychology at other institutions. During this time, I also worked in a children’s therapy centre, delivering individualised early intervention therapy to pre-school-aged children with ASC, social communication difficulties, and developmental delays.
My research investigates the use of oral storytelling practices in UK families, with a focus on comparing the linguistic input and interaction generated during oral storytelling versus shared book reading activities.
I am currently undertaking a Graduate Teaching Assistant studentship, which allows me to pursue my PhD part-time while contributing to the teaching and assessment of the BSc Psychology degree.
Xihan Hu
I completed my MRes in Experimental Psychology here at Manchester and am now continuing as a PhD student. My main interest lies in understanding how children think—particularly how they make decisions, reason through problems, and sometimes even choose to deceive. I’ve explored these themes through research on school climate, communication, and the impact of childhood experiences, as well as through my own experimental work on children’s deceptive behaviour. I enjoy examining the ways children weigh options, manage impulses, and develop reasoning skills, and how these processes connect to their broader social and educational environments.
I’m also drawn to applied work, especially translating research into practice. This has included supporting school-based interventions and creating accessible materials for teachers, parents, and students. Bridging research with real-world application keeps me motivated, and I hope to continue exploring how children’s decision-making and reasoning develop across different contexts.
Alaa Ewaida
I am a PhD candidate researching the risk and protective factors influencing spoken language development in deaf children. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Audiology and Speech Therapy and a Master’s degree in Advanced Audiology.
Before beginning my PhD, I worked for five years as a clinical audiologist and speech and language therapist, primarily supporting preschool-aged deaf children through audiological care and language interventions. My current research interests focus on spoken language development in deaf children, with the aim of improving support services and early interventions provided to them.
Centre Staff
Kate Malone
Centre Co-ordinator
I joined the Child Study Centre in March 2025 after working as a Primary School teacher for 10 years. I have a degree in Psychology and a particular interest in child psychology, which fits in well with the research we do here.
As Centre Co-ordinator, I am the first point of contact for families and interested participants. I manage our participant database and help with recruiting families to the database.
Laura Mitchell
Centre Manager
I have worked for a variety of externally funded research projects at the University of Manchester for over 15 years. My degree was in Environment, Ecology and Economics but I’ve always had a keen interest in Psychology and Early Years education.
My Role in LuCiD
I oversee the day to day operations of the Centre and coordinate the impact and communications strategy. I’m based in Manchester, but provide support across the LuCiD network.
Contact Us
+44 (0) 161 306 6000
childstudycentre@manchester.ac.uk
