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Jo Taylor
Postdoctoral Fellow
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Contact details
| E-mail address: | joanne.taylor@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk |
| Telephone: | +44 (0)1223 355294 (extension 220) |
| Direct line: | +44 (0)1223 01223 273625 |
| Fax: | +44 (0)1223 359062 |
| Address: | MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge, CB2 7EF |
Research areas
The aim of my research is to understand how we learn to read words. To illustrate what a complex skill reading is take a look at the following poem extracts,
"Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead --
For goodness sake don't call it 'deed'!"
(Anonymous poem believed to have first appeared in The Times, 1936)
"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe."
(Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll, 1872)
I completed my doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2009, and was supervised by Professors Kate Nation and Kim Plunkett. For my PhD research I developed a new method for investigating reading acquisition in which adults learn to read new words written in unfamiliar symbols – an artificial orthography. I discovered that we are able to extract spelling-sound patterns through exposure to whole words and their pronunciations. We are then able to generalize and read further sets of new words written in the same artificial script. I also found that if we are familiar with what the new words sound like or what they mean, it helps us when we subsequently learn to read them.
In my current experiments I am working with Dr Matt Davis. We are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to understand what the brain is doing when it learns to read new words.
Particular questions include:
How does learning to read differ from other language tasks such as learning the names of objects?
Are different brain systems important for learning irregular words such as YACHT and general spelling-sound rules which we use to read new words such as CATCH?
How do the brain systems that represent knowledge about word mearnings interact with those that represent knowledge about spelling-sound mappings to help us learn to read?
Are early learned words represented differently in the brain from words we learn to read later?
CBU publications
- TAYLOR, J.S.H., Plunkett, K. & Nation, K. (2011) The influence of consistency, frequency, and semantics on learning to read: An artificial orthography paradigm, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37(1), 60-76 #
- TAYLOR, J.S.H., Rastle, K., & DAVIS, M.H. (2011) Learning object names activates the visual word form area more than learning to read: evidence from fMRI #