Laura Wakeford

I’m a Lecturer within the Division of Psychology and Forensic Sciences at Abertay. I completed my MA and ESRC-funded MSc and PhD in Psychology at the University of Dundee. Prior to joining Abertay in 2019, I worked on two research projects titled ‘Predicting Online Radicalisation’ (University of Bath) and ‘An Experimental Investigation of Syntactic Priming and the Lexical Boost in Language Production’ (University of Dundee).

 As a cognitive psychologist, I am particularly interested in how attention is distributed during reading; or more specifically, whether we can lexically process more than one word at a time. This research has, in collaboration with Dr Wayne Murray, typically involved using eye tracking technologies to test models of eye movement control during reading.

More generally, I am also interested in the factors that influence language production. This involves further exploring the structural priming effect (i.e., the well-established finding that we are more likely to reproduce a syntactic structure we have just encountered rather than construct one anew), as well as measuring how language evolves to align with group affiliations as they develop over time.