معرفی
Dr Kate Messenger is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on language understanding and production mechanisms across different populations, with particular emphasis on acquisition processes.
Her primary research interests include:
- People's ability to understand and produce language
- Language acquisition processes across the lifespan
- Children and adults' learning and processing of sentence structure
- Language development in monolingual and bilingual children
- Second language acquisition in adult learners
- Implicit learning mechanisms in language development
Dr Messenger's recent publications demonstrate her expertise in syntactic priming research and bilingual language development. Her work consistently employs experimental methodologies to examine how language structures are learned through implicit mechanisms and social interaction. The 2025 publications particularly highlight her focus on cross-linguistic influences, online interaction effects on grammar learning, and priming effects in child language acquisition.
She currently supervises PhD students in Developmental Psychology and is actively involved in multiple research projects examining language learning mechanisms.
Current research projects include:
- The role of speaker identity on children's predictive grammar learning (2024-2026)
- The generality of expectation violation as a mechanism for language learning (2023-2026)
- Cross-linguistic influence and shared syntax in bilingual language development (2020-2023)
- How language experience supports language development through short-term priming and long-term learning (2018-2023)
- Syntactic priming as implicit learning in first and second language speakers (2017-2022)
