Hello!

I’m Katie Twomey, a language researcher fascinated by early language acquisition and lucky enough to be able to study it for a living.

This website contains links for parents interested in early language acquisition, and links to my recent research, amongst other nuggets. Make yourself comfortable but be warned, some of the information on this site is so interesting it’ll knock your very socks off.

I use neural networks and empirical methods to explore how children learn to group objects and actions together, and how they learn words for these categories. In particular, I’m interested in the difference between learning in the lab, and the real-world, curiosity-based learning that forms the majority of children’s experiences.

It’s great fun. Everyone should try being a geek once in a while. People in the pub really like it when you tell them all about statistical analyses in R. I’ve made loads of friends that way. When I’m not doing that I like to invent condiments out of what I find in the bottom of my fridge, and when I run out of coriander, go for great big walks in the beautiful Lancashire countryside. One day I hope to have my own robot.

PS: Call me Katie, please, or I’ll think I’ve done something awful.

PPS: I’ve never bothered to learn HTML so points to everyone who spots any horrible errors (and tells me. No points for you if you don’t tell me).