Supervision
I’m available to supervise UG and PG dissertations.
I enjoy exploring how people learn and generalise—how they move from concrete surface representations (like words and chunks) to more abstract ones (like rules and patterns). Most of my work has focused on language, but I’m also happy to supervise projects on learning more broadly.
Please do get in touch if you’re interested in working with me on any of the following topics:
- word segmentation
- rule learning
- rule generalisation
- pedagogical theory and practice
- psychology of learning
Methods I’m happy to supervise:
- behavioural experiments (especially psycholinguistic methods and artificial language learning)
- corpus studies
- computational modelling and simulation
- statistical analysis, both frequentist and Bayesian
Resources for supervisees
Managing your literature
- Blog post I wrote on organising notes on academic literature using a synthesis matrix.
- UoE guidance on reference management tools.
Designing your experiment
Structuring your dissertation
- More excellent slides by Prof. Jennifer Culbertson on:
- the anatomy of an academic article, and the same applies to a dissertation.
- the anatomy of an abstract.
- how to report results (though note that for us, the quantitative analysis isn’t optional!)
- Coming soon: How to structure academic writing using principles from storytelling (blog post)
Finding your writerly voice
- To develop a clear and pleasant writing style, follow the principles in these fantastic books (I like to reread them every couple years):
- Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams (1990)
- Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword (2012)
- Coming soon: A step-by-step walkthrough of my favourite way to plan, draft, and revise a piece of writing (blog post)
Previous supervisees
Sigurd Farstad Iversen (MSc Evolution of Language and Cognition, 2023)