Speaker
Professor Danielle Matthews
Professor of Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Sheffield
Biography
Professor Danielle Matthews’s research focuses on how children learn to talk, in particular how infants and young children learn from experience to use words and grammar in a communicatively effective way. Her current research is concerned with the learning mechanisms that allow the development of a broad set of pragmatic abilities, and is interested in how conversational experience (that can differ as a function of, e.g., deafness) explains pragmatic development, and what the consequences are for later outcomes and social wellbeing. Upon moving to Sheffield, Danielle became interested in the relation between social disadvantages and language development. Although there are well established correlations, it is not well understood why this is so and there is relatively little evidence about what practical steps could be taken to promote preschool language development so all children arrive at school with the language skills that can help them to thrive. She is interested in using properly controlled intervention studies to test causal hypotheses.