I am interested in how children perceive spoken language through what they hear and what they see and how this relates to language and literacy development. Along with Dr Matt Davis, I am currently running the Speech, Hearing and Early Language Learning (SHELL) Study, a large-scale project investigating hearing, speech perception and spoken language skills in primary school classrooms. Specifically, we are interested in how variations in hearing levels, auditory and audio-visual speech perception relate to the speed and efficiency with which children recognise spoken words and to their broader language, literacy and educational outcomes. To do this we are using gamified measures on tablets with headphones to conduct simultaneous whole-class testing. A key part of this work is to make our data collection mutually beneficial to children/schools and researchers by running science activity days that our data collection will be interspersed throughout. Bringing science into the community (both online and in person) is something I enjoy doing both directly in projects I run and as as a member of the Brain Bus team.

Other techniques I have used include eyetracking, structural equation modelling and training studies and my previous work focussed on the relationship between visual speech perception, phonological awareness and reading in deaf and hearing children.