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Leah Roberts
Leader, Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Education

Biography

Before joining the Department of Education in September 2011, I spent eight years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in the Language Acquisition Group, firstly on a project funded by the Dutch Science Foundation on acquisition and processing in bilingual and multilingual speakers, then later in project on acquisition and information structure. Prior to that, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Essex in the Department of Languages and Linguistics on a Leverhulme-funded project comparing real-time language processing of child and adult learners.

I obtained my first degree from the University of East London in 1997 in Linguistics with Education Studies, and did my postgraduate studies at the University of Essex, obtaining an MA in Language Acquisition in 1999 and a PhD on syntactic processing in second language learners in in 2003.

The focus of my research is in second language learning and processing at the word-, sentence- and discourse-levels. Recent research topics include what adult and child learners can acquire (in and out of the classroom environment) after only a small amount of exposure to a brand new language, and at the other end of the proficiency-continuum, how two languages interact in the mind of functionally bilingual speakers during real-time language comprehension.

*** I am interested in supervising research students in any of the following areas: second language/bilingual grammatical/discourse processing and acquisition, cross-linguistic influences in SLA, classroom intervention studies on language learning of grammar/discourse, naturalistic and/or classroom-based first exposure to a new language ***

I teach on the following MA modules in the department:

  • Cross-linguistic Influences in Second Language Acquisition
  • Developmental Psycholinguistics
  • Research Methods for Applied Linguistics
  • Planning and Communicating Research

Contact details

D/M/112
Department of Education
University of York
York
YO10 5DD

Tel: +44 (0)1904 323450