Anna Theakston

Co-Director ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD)

www.lucid.ac.uk

Anna Theakston received her undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Nottingham. Following this, she was employed as a researcher at the University of Manchester working on two ESRC-funded projects investigating early language development in children between the ages of 2-3 years. She was awarded her Ph.D. based on this work. She then coordinated the Manchester-based Max Planck Child Study Centre, funded by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, before being appointed to a lectureship at the University of Manchester. She is now a Professor of Developmental Psychology, and Co-director of the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD).

I am interested in children’s early language and communicative development during the preschool and early school years. I situate my research within a usage-based framework, placing particular emphasis on the interaction between the child and their environment and the role of caregiver input in children’s developing linguistic representations.  Recent projects have included investigations of early gestural communication, caregiver-child communicative interactions, the acquisition of grammatical constructions, understanding the origins of children’s grammatical errors, inflectional morphology, and the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics in the development of complex language. A number of recent studies have involved crosslinguistic comparisons in these areas of development. In my research I employ a variety of methodological approaches including corpus analysis and experiments utilising behavioural and online measures, and collaborate with computational modellers to allow multimethod approaches to a particular issue. In addition, some projects take place within real-world contexts, such as schools, nurseries and cultural institutions, and require a variety of data collection and analysis techniques.

If you are interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in these or related areas, please contact me via email.

Current PhD Students

Alaa Ewaida, Irem Ozturk Mihci, Sarah Breen, Senyu Chen, Phoebe Walker-Sharpe, David Price-Williams

Available open access theses

Previous PhD students supervised:

• Davis, Michelle (2024) The acquisition of tag questions.
• Lester, Nicola (2023) The role of cultural institutions in promoting language learning opportunities for children from minority populations.
• Jones, Lindsey (2022) Think, talk, explore: the effects of a home-based pilot science intervention with caregivers of deaf and typically hearing pre-school children.
• Finch, Katy (2022) The impact of statutory Modern Foreign Language (MFL) teaching in multilingual Key Stage 2 classrooms.
• Bell, Kim (2021) An investigation into the role of the input on children's acquisition of modal verbs.
• Lemen, Heather (2021) The role of complexity and input patterns on children's acquisition of adverbial connective function.
• Buckle, Leone (2020) A developmental investigation of animacy and prototypical transitivity in sentence production and comprehension.
• Boundy, Laura (2018) Understanding the communicative intentions and perceptions behind early infant gestures.
• Okuno, Akiko (2018) Cross-linguistic differences in encoding of causality: how English and Japanese children learn form-meaning mapping during development.
• Mcknight, Stacey (2016) An investigation of the use of case marked pronouns in English-speaking children.
• Lemetyinen, Henna (2016) Investigating Finnish-speaking children's noun morphology: How do young children acquire case marking?
• Austin, Keith (2013) The acquisition of negation and affirmation. An investigation of children’s early comprehension.
• Junge, Bianca (2013) Ordering effects in the acquisition of complex sentences: a multivariate approach.
• Child, Simon (2012) Investigating the development of cognitive symbolic representation and gestural communication.
• Ibbotson, Paul (2011) A cognitive constructivist approach to early syntax acquisition.
• Graf, Eileen (2010) An experimental pragmatics approach to children’s argument omissions.
• Fontaine, Laura (2009) Subject and object wh-questions in child language acquisition.
• Krajewski, Grzegorz (2008) A constructivist investigation into the development of Polish noun inflections in children between two- and three-and-a-half years of age.
• Kirjavainen, Minna (2008) The development of complements-clauses in child speech.
• Matthews, Danielle (2005) A constructivist investigation of the development of word order and reference in young children.
• Maslen, Robert (2005) A usage-based account of the development of inflectional morphology and transitivity: analysis of a dense naturalistic corpus.
• Ambridge, Ben (2004) Experimental investigations of the formation and restriction of abstract grammatical constructions in young children.
• Savage, Ceri (2003) Syntactic priming in child language acquisition.
• Cameron-Faulkner, Thea (2002) A construction-based analysis of child language acquisition.

• PSYC21021 Topics in Developmental Psychology
• PSYC30920 Project Supervision (3rd year)
• PSYC31121: Language and Communicative Development in Educational Settings
• MRes Psychology:  Dissertation supervision