Language and Communication Research Group

Areas of expertise and research

Reading, spelling and dyslexia: particularly with respect to different orthographies, handedness and spatial processing, working memory
The neuropsychology of language, including reading (developmental dyslexia) and speech (aphasia)
Nonverbal communication: early communication; communication and interpretation of emotion.

More on our BPS-sponsored seminar series.

Members of the group and their research

Dr Bahman Baluch's research interests include the cognitive processes involved in reading and the role of orthography in visual word recognition. Dr Baluch recently published the first systematic report on cognitive aspects of literacy acquisition in Persian and contributed a chapter in Joshi and Aaron's (2005) text, Handbook of Orthographies and Literacy. He has also collaborated with Ilhan Raman and Derek Besner to examine the role of semantics in speeded naming in Persian and Turkish.

Dr Nicola Brunswick has carried out research in neuroimaging and cognitive testing of children and adults with normal reading skills and with developmental dyslexia. With colleagues from the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology she studied French, Italian and English dyslexics and demonstrated that there was a universal neurobiological basis for developmental dyslexia and that differences between different cultures' reading ability was attributable to the use of different orthographies (data were published in Science and Nature Neuroscience). She has recently contributed chapters to the influential Handbook of children's Literacy, to Human Neuropsychology, and to the forthcoming book, The Neural Basis of Reading.

Dr Fabia Franco is Director of the BabyLab, designed to examine children's early verbal and nonverbal communication skills. She has worked closely with colleagues in Milan, Edinburgh, and Rome to examine the role of joint attention in infants’ communication, while with colleagues in Padua and Cambridge she has studied cross-linguistically implicit causality in verbs of visual perception. She has been one of the main contributors to the experimental study of production or initiation of pointing. She is also currently researching aspects of the relationship between language and music.

Dr Paul de Mornay Davies has collaborated with colleagues at Royal Holloway on imageability effects in semantic processing and has challenged existing models of semantic representation. The influence of this interpretation is wide-ranging, affecting theories of semantic representation in psycholinguistics, neuropsychology and connectionist modelling. In collaboration with colleagues from Cambridge University and more recently, UC Davis, he has recently published several studies examining past-tense processing in brain damaged adults (non-fluent aphasics and patients with herpes simplex encephalitis). The work has contributed significantly to the ongoing debate concerning the nature of language processing in the brain.