Amanda Hickey
Lecturer

Research

Overview

1. Investigating factors that influence the generalisation of newly learnt grammatical rules in children and adults.
2. Investigating the role of community and sense of belonging for Disabled Students within Higher Education. 

Projects

1. I am interested in verbal and written language development in both typical and atypical populations.  My current PhD research is exploring typical verbal grammar learning and development through the learning mechanism ‘Statistical Learning’.  Statistical Learning is the ability to extract patterns from the environment and my focus is on how different grammatical patterns interact in this learning process.  I also investigate factors that may influence the generalisation of these patterns to novel words, in both children and adults.  To explore this, I employ psycholinguistic training and testing techniques using an artificial language, which incorporates different grammatical patterns drawn from natural languages.  I also collect data on a range of standardised test to investigate associations between performance on the psycholinguistic tasks and other verbal and non-verbal abilities.
2. I’m also very interested in the disabled student experience within Higher Education.  Provisions and support for disabled students has greatly improved over the last 20-30 years and record numbers of disabled students are now entering HE. However, even with accessibility support, these students are still more vulnerable to attrition, lower attainment and reduced job prospects. This suggests that additional factors need to be considered to better understand how to support disabled students in HE. One potentially important factor to investigate is a student’s sense of belonging, as academia can be quite a lonely space for those with disabilities. Another factor is gender, as gendered experiences could interact with the challenges faced by disabled students to magnify barriers to attainment. As such, this research project aims to explore how building a sense of belonging and community among disabled students could further close the outcome gap between disabled and non-disabled students, and also whether gendered experiences play an important role in explaining this outcome gap.

Research group(s)

• Sleep, Language and Memory (SLAM) Laboratory
• Developmental Research Group

Collaborators

• Dr Emma Hayiou-Thomas
• Dr Jelena Mirković
• Lilian Joy (Digital Education Team)

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Neuroscience of Developmental Disorders  | Brain & Behaviour | Year 1
• Semantic Aphasia Practical | Brain & Behaviour | Year 1
• Intelligence | Social, Personality & Abnormal Psychology | Year 2
• Cognitive Development | Development & Language | Year 2
• Mini Project Coordinator | Development & Language | Year 1
• Literature Survey Supervisor | Year 3
• Project Supervisor | Year 3 BSc and Year 4 MSci

Postgraduate

• Co-supervisor of Development, Disorder & Clinical Practise MSc Research Projects (2018-2020)

Other teaching

• York Learning and Teaching Award, HEA Accredited Course (2018-2019) - Award Winner 
• Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practise, AdvanceHE accredited (2021-Present day)
• York Global Summer School, Pre-University Psychology Module Co-ordinator, teaching the Neurodiversity Topic

Publications

Selected publications

• Hickey, A. J., Hayiou-Thomas, M. E., & Mirković, J. (2019).  Grammatical Generalisation in Statistical Learning: Is it Implicit and Invariant across Development?  Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 41. 

Paper Presentations

• Hickey, A. J. (2023). Considering the role of community and sense of belonging for students with disabilities.  Paper presented at the Learning & Teaching Conference, York, UK.   
• Hickey, A. J., Joy, L., & Brooke, J. (2022).  The Distractibles: An interactive peer-learning session to support neurodivergent staff and students. Paper presented at the AdvanceHE: Teaching & Learning Conference, Newcastle, UK.
• Hickey, A. J., Hayiou-Thomas, M. E., & Mirković, J. (2022, June).  Grammatical Generalisation in Statistical Learning: Contributions of implicit and explicit knowledge.  Paper presented at the Interdisciplinary Advances in Statistical Learning, San Sebastián, Spain.