What goes on in the human mind? Learning, Stammering, and Prioritising

Reading is a crucial skill - and reading well means understanding most of the words we read. Yet the main way children learn new words is by reading itself. Reading enables us to learn words we have never heard spoken. But will a child learn the meaning of a new word better if it is seen repeatedly in a favourite book or if it is seen the same number of times across different books? We are investigating whether children and adults learn word meanings more easily and/or more effectively when the new words are presented in identical sentences, in different sentences, or in different topics.  

Precrastination is the tendency to prioritize sub-goals over the larger goal and by doing so spending more time doing the task or using more energy than needed. Precrastination could be thought of as a conceptual opposite of procrastination, yet the research on precrastination is still in its infancy. In this talk I will outline how we can experimentally study precrastination, why some individual show the tendency to precrastinate, its relationship to other personality characteristics and ways to mitigate this negative tendency.

Dyslexia and stammering are two neurodivergent groups that affect language processing with a similar mechanism being argued to be shared between them. In this talk, the findings of the research exploring the ability to manipulate sounds within language in these two neurodivergent groups, discuss what this means for them and discuss possibilities for future research. Being able to understand the similarities of these two neurodivergent conditions will help us develop better tools to better support them in an educational environment and improve their quality of life.