A quick career biography:

I graduated from Sussex University in 1981 with a degree in Experimental Psychology. I went to Edinburgh where I did a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. I spent four years ('84-'88) working as a postdoctoral researcher on a project with about 15 other people trying to build a computer that would be able to recognize normal speech. It didn't. I left in 1988 to rejoin the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at Sussex (now the Department of Psychology), this time as a lecturer, and came to York in 1996.

What I work on

I work on the psychology of language, a topic that I've been interested in since my last year as an undergraduate. After graduating, I became interested in how we deal with ambiguity, and why the following perfectly grammatical sentences are problematic

1. The psychology lecturer told the girl that she should have listened to to repeat the question.
2. He'll reply to the letter he received tomorrow.

After spending far too much time researching this kind of thing, I shifted topic (ever so slightly) and started working on how we establish, as we read or hear a sentence, 'who did what to whom' - that is, how we figure out the relationships between the different things mentioned in the sentence. In fact, that's not so different from what I was doing before, it's just that now I didn't have to study ambiguity, but could study unambiguous sentences also. If you're interested, you can read a quick summary of all this work by selecting the research menu item on the right. The summary is very brief, and probably not entirely self-explanatory. As soon as I've got the time, I'll improve it. Paradoxically perhaps, I now study language by monitoring eye movements... (and you can read about this also in the research section). This is what I've been doing for the past 10 years or so (interspersed with moments of sanity when I study other things). I quickly became interested in how language can direct attention around the external world, and then became interested in how our perception of the external world might influence our interpretation of sentences that refer to that world. So just to give a flavour* of this otherwise uninterpretable description of what I do: it turns out that if you hear 'the boy will eat the cake', and simultaneously see a number of things, including a cake, you'll look at the cake during 'eat'. In fact, if you had previously seen the cake, but it's gone by the time you hear the sentence, you'd look during 'eat' to where the cake had been.

I also work on the acquisition of grammatical information, the use of neural networks to model that acquisition process, and the ways in which adult language processing is just a consequence of the ways in which we first learn about language as young infants.

To find out more...

To find out more about my research, teaching, current preoccupations (children, Oxford University Press marketing division, Coffee, etc. etc.), use the menu on the right.

*for our US cousins: flavour = flavor.