Ruth Corps

Dr Ruth Corps is an Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Psychology at the University of Sheffield, affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Centre of the Social Sciences (ICOSS). Her research focuses on cognitive mechanisms underlying language comprehension, prediction in dialogue, and turn-taking coordination. She investigates how listeners and speakers use contextual and linguistic cues to anticipate and plan responses, with a particular interest in the interplay between content and timing predictions in real-time conversation.

Her work employs methodologies such as eye-tracking, experimental psycholinguistics, and acoustic analysis to study topics like predictive processing in bilingual speakers, the role of repetition in lexical access, and the limitations of inter-speaker gaps in turn-taking timing. Recent findings challenge traditional assumptions about egocentric prediction and highlight the importance of semantic over form-based predictions in degraded speech comprehension.

Ruth’s research also explores dual-task interference effects on turn-end prediction and the cognitive stages involved in response planning during question-answering. She has contributed to debates about replication in cognitive science, including a notable failure to replicate findings on word frequency effects in picture naming tasks.

Her affiliations include the School of Psychology and ICOSS, where she collaborates on interdisciplinary projects. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and has published extensively on topics such as visual-world eye-tracking methodologies, bilingualism, and conversational dynamics.