Javier Aguado Orea

Dr Javier Aguado Orea is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Sheffield Hallam University, affiliated with the College of Social Sciences and Arts. His roles include teaching developmental psychology, research methods, and supervising postgraduate research in early grammatical knowledge and language acquisition. He joined Sheffield Hallam in 2014 and previously taught at Spanish universities including Universidad de Zaragoza, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, and Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He holds a BSc in Psychology from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and a PhD in Psychology from The University of Nottingham (2004).

His research focuses on early child language development, particularly exploring how young children acquire grammatical structures in English and Spanish. He employs both naturalistic speech analysis (using the CHILDES system and computational simulations) and experimental methods such as intermodal preferential looking designs and grammaticality judgements. Current projects include studying inflectional errors in bilingual children via sentence repetition tasks. He collaborates with the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (Lucid) and contributes to interdisciplinary groups: Cognitive and Neuroscience, Language Interest Group, and Education, Lifespan, & Development Research Support and Interest Group.

Dr Orea is professionally qualified by Spain’s ANECA and advocates for language development disorder awareness through his membership in the 'Language Makers' guild. His teaching spans MSc Psychology (Hong Kong/Sheffield), MSc Developmental Psychology, and BSc Psychology courses. Supervision areas include language acquisition, assessment across ages, and implicit learning processes.