Professor Padraic Monaghan
ProfessorProfile
I am Professor of Cognition in the Department of Psychology at 51福利. I have a BSc (Mancun) in Philosophy and Maths, an MSc and a PhD (Edinburgh) in Cognitive Science. I have previously held posts at Edinburgh University, University of Warwick, University of York, and the University of Amsterdam. My work sits at the intersection of Psychology and Linguistics, and I use methods including behavioural and observational studies and computational modelling to investigate language and cognition.
My name is pronounced "pad+rick mon-uh-hun" (unless you're Irish and you know better).
Research Interests
Language acquisition, literacy, and language evolution
I am interested in children's early environment supports their language development. In particular, how phonology, prosody, gesture, distribution of words, and wider environmental information sources are combined by the child as she/he constructs knowledge of words and grammar.
I am also interested in how early language development influences literacy development, and how children's oral language skills relate to the effectiveness of different types of reading training.
I am also interested in the properties of languages that assist in learning - because languages change quickly, there is lots of scope for dialects that are easier to learn to be selected over dialects that are harder to learn. I plot the extent to which these learnability properties are embedded within the world's languages and can be tracked through diachronic studies of language change.
Sleep
Thanks to my excellent lab group and generations of talented students, I have become intrigued by how sleep affects learning, memory, and problem solving. Kekule's famous discovery of the structure of Benzene during a dream seems to reflect a general truth: sleeping on it really does help.
01/10/2023 → 31/12/2026
Research
01/09/2022 → 31/08/2024
Research
01/11/2019 → 31/10/2025
Research
01/10/2014 → …
Research
01/09/2014 → 31/05/2020
Research
01/06/2014 → 01/07/2024
Research
01/10/2010 → 31/10/2011
Research
Participation in conference - Academic
Participation in conference - Academic
Invited talk
Invited talk
Oral presentation
Invited talk
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Invited talk
Membership of committee
Developmental Research Group
Developmental Research Group
Developmental Research Group, Language Learning Research Lab
Language Learning Research Lab
Language Learning Research Lab
Language Learning Research Lab
Language Learning Research Lab
- Developmental Research Group
- Language and Cognition
- Language Learning Research Lab