Eva Gutierrez-Sigut

Dr. Eva Gutierrez-Sigut is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex, where she has been employed since July 2019. Her academic journey includes a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of La Laguna (Spain), followed by postdoctoral research at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California Davis, a research fellowship at the UCL Deafness, Cognition and Language research centre, and an independent research fellowship at the University of Valencia.

Her research primarily focuses on how atypical language development due to early onset deafness impacts language and reading skills at both behavioral and neuropsychological levels. She investigates how deaf individuals process language and reading, with particular interest in phonological and semantic properties of language and their influence on reading attainment in deaf people. Her work explores the connections between visual-orthographic and semantic levels of language processing, which appear to have a stronger influence than phonological processing on deaf people's reading ability.

Analysis of her recent publications reveals consistent themes across cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and deaf studies. Her research demonstrates that deaf readers automatically access phonological information but that this doesn't necessarily contribute to reading comprehension attainment. She has also shown that skilled deaf readers have stronger connections between orthographic and lexical-semantic processing levels. Her work on sign language processing indicates that deaf signers process both phonological and semantic information using similar—but not identical—mechanisms as hearing people.

• 2020: British Academy grant for 'COVID-19 and reduced access to communication: the challenges experienced by deaf people'

Dr. Gutierrez-Sigut currently supervises at least one PhD student, Max James Handley. Her teaching responsibilities include Cognitive Psychology and Economics (EC956), Thinking and the Mind (PS104), Applied Psychology (PS118), Cognitive Psychology (PS425), MSc Psychology Research Project (PS900), Neurocognition of Human Interaction (PS935), and Advanced Cognitive Psychology (PS952). Her research has important implications for developing tools to identify deaf children who struggle with literacy and for creating training programs for deaf readers.