Bachelor of Arts (European Languages)

In 1994 I graduated with third-year French, Italian, and Psychology at UTas, and went on to Honours in Psychology. A Commonwealth Scholarship took me to the University of Oxford, where I gained my DPhil in Experimental Psychology, studying children's spelling of grammatical patterns. I went on to two post-doctoral positions: one at the University of Manchester, examining toddlers' acquisition of grammatical categories, and one at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver), managing a project on the early detection of language delay. In July 2005, I returned to UTas to take up a lectureship in Psychology.

Studying French has made my travels to France and to other francophone areas (including West Africa) a rewarding experience. However, it also increased my understanding of language in general, and sparked the interest in language structure that has underlain my work ever since. Learning a foreign language can inspire you in more ways than you would expect!