Project news

January 2026: Welcome to Mingtong Li!

Mingtong Li has just joined us as a Postdoctoral Research Associate for SENFM. She recently completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Warwick, where her research examined how children and adults use iconic cues in hand gestures and speech prosody to interpret new words. We are very happy to welcome her to the team!

October 2025: Welcome to Kylan Smith!

Kylan Smith has been a part of the SENFM team as a Research Assistant for the past few months, and he has now officially taken on the role as Lab Manager for the project! He has recently completed his MSc in Psycholinguistics at the University of York, where his work explores how the rhythm of speech can influence the perceived meaning. We are very excited to have him in his new role on a full-time basis!

September 2025: Charlotte starts her PhD!

Charlotte has just began her PhD at Ulster University in Northern Ireland, where she is exploring children's social development and how their behaviours, values, and understanding of the world can be shaped by the people around them. She will still be involved in the SENFM project as a Lab Manager, but now on a part-time basis. We wish her luck as she embarks on her PhD journey!

September 2025: SENFM at CLS

We were excited to present some of our preliminary results from SENFM at the Child Language Symposium in Reading, September 2025. Charlotte presented a talk on our first looking-preference experiment, and Florence presented a poster on a pre-registered study that we hope to launch soon! See below for a photo!

August 2025: Goodbye and Good Luck to Raji!

Wishing all the best to Raji, who has moved to South Korea to pursue a new role as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ManyBabies project. She is no co-leading the ManyBabies-AtHome: Word Recognition project. Good luck Raji, and thanks for all your work on SENFM!

June 2025: Welcome to our Research Assistants!

We are delighted to welcome Anna, Georgie and Lucy to the SENFM team! Anna and Georgie are undergraduate students in Psychology, and Lucy is an undergraduate in Linguistics.

May-June 2025: ICPC, WILD, and UKIS, oh my! SENFM at three summer conferences.

We presented some of the first data from SENFM at three conferences over the summer: Catherine presented a talk at the International Child Phonology Conference (ICPC) in Budapest, May 2025; Florence, Raji, and Charlotte each presented  posters at the Workshop on Infant Language Development (WILD) in San Sebastian, June 2025; and Catherine, Florence, and Charlotte presented a poster at the UK and Ireland Speech Workshop (UKIS) in York, June 2025. See below for some photos!

January 2025: Started data collection!

We are very excited to share that we have officially begun data collection for this study! After pilot testing our methods at the end of last year (during November and December), we have now started our new year by collecting data for the home-recording component of this project. We have had over 50 families express their interest in our project, and currently have a number of families that have officially signed up and are participating!

October 2024: Welcome to Raji!

Rajalakshmi (Raji) Madhavan has joined us as a new Postdoctoral Research Associate for SENFM. She has recently completed her PhD from the University of Göttingen, where her thesis explored parent-child dynamics in social interactions, particularly examining how parental input and children’s selective interests in various topics influence the interaction, and subsequently the novel word learning that occurs. We are excited to have her as part of our team! 

August 2024: Welcome to Charlotte!

Charlotte Blake has just joined us from the University of Kent, where she is just finishing up her MSc in Developmental Psychology with a dissertation on the topic of children's thinking, communication, and morality, supervised by Dr. Angela Nyhout. Charlotte is the Lab Manager for SENFM and will be supporting us across a range of administrative and research-based tasks.

July 2024: Attendance at ICIS 2024

We had a great time attending the International Congress of Infant Studies in Glasgow, 9-11th July. You can view the poster that we presented here, and see below for a photo!

June 2024: Poster presentation at ICIS 2024!

Our pilot study, led by Margherita Belia, has been accepted for a poster presentation at the International Congress of Infant Studies in Glasgow, July 2024. This presentation will be based on an initial exploratory study where we tested babies at different time-points to establish a methodological framework for collecting and analysing lingual ultrasound data with infants. This is a collaborative project with George Bailey, Sam Cobb, Chris Cox, Florence Oxley and Amelia Gully, funded by a HRC Postgraduate Collaborative Project Grant awarded to Margherita Belia (University of York) and an Interacting Minds Centre Seed Fund grant awarded to Chris Cox (Aarhus University/University of York).

February 2024: Recruitment update!

We are pleased to announce that we have just recruited two new postdocs to the project: Florence Oxley, starting in April 2024, and Raji Satarai Madhavan, starting in September 2024. A Lab Manager job vacancy will be posted soon!