Our people

Director

Associate Professor Michael Proctor

Associate Professor Michael Proctor investigates speech production and perception, and phonological organization in human language. He uses MRI, electromagnetic articulography (EMA), ultrasound, eye-tracking, and other technologies to investigate how speech sounds are made and processed, and how language is acquired and used by adults, children, second language learners, and disordered populations.

Director

Dr Nan Xu Rattanasone

Dr Nan Xu Rattanasone's research is focused on the development of young bilingual children and those with hearing loss. Her work on language acquisition sheds light on preschoolers' language and emergent literacy skills with direct implications for school readiness and atypical language development. Her work has been supported by funding from the NSW Department of Education, the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council, as well as from philanthropic sources. Dr Nan Xu Rattanasone has participated as a project leader at the HEARing Cooperative Research Centre and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders.

Professor Felicity Cox

Professor Felicity Cox's main research interests include the phonetic and phonological analysis of sound change, the acquisition of phonology, and sociophonetics. She is the President of the Australian Speech Science and Technology Association, and a member of the International Phonetic Association, the Association for Laboratory Phonology and the Australian Linguistic Society.

Distinguished Professor Katherine Demuth

Distinguished Professor Katherine Demuth is the Director of the Child Language Lab. Her research focuses on language acquisition, including studies of speech and language perception and production. She is especially interested in the development of phonological and morphological representations, speech planning, and the development of language processing abilities in both typically developing, language-impaired children, and hearing-impaired children bilinguals and L2 learners. Much of her work is cross-linguistic, using acoustic analysis and a wide variety of behavioural and neural techniques to better understand the mechanisms underlying language acquisition.

Dr Iain Giblin

Dr Iain Giblin's research focuses on syntax and children’s acquisition of syntax. His research program is situated within Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar and investigates the common structural basis of human language and how this knowledge is attained.

Dr Loes Koring

Dr Loes Koring is interested in the structure (syntax and semantics) of human language, how these structures are processed in our brains, and how this is acquired. Current projects include the syntax and semantics of posture verbs, children’s acquisition of argument structure, children’s production of negative questions, scope assignment and children’s understanding of sentences with quantifiers.

Professor Mark Johnson

Professor Mark Johnson's research area is computational linguistics – ie. explicit computational models of language acquisition, comprehension and production. His recent work focused on probabilistic models for syntactic parsing (identifying the way words combine to form phrases and sentences) and semantic interpretation, and on Bayesian models of the acquisition of phonology, morphology and the lexicon.

Professor Mridula Sharma

Professor Mridula Sharma's research is in auditory processing with a specific focus on listening in noise and the link between hearing, listening and reading.