Improving communication through sleeping, reading, and listening: A psycholinguist’s journey from the lab to the field

Jelena Mirković

York St John University, UK

As you are reading this sentence, your mind is applying the rules of English grammar, effortlessly and with no conscious awareness. This process enables you to understand what the sentence means, and in particular who is doing what to whom. This is an essential part of successful communication and it crucially depends on our ability to learn and use grammar. In this talk I will present research that examines the cognitive mechanisms that underpin this ability. I will show what role sleep-related memory consolidation plays in grammar learning, how the language we hear and we read shapes our language use, and how what we know about the mechanisms of grammar learning can be used to improve children’s language skills in low-resource multilingual settings.

Dr Jelena Mirković is Associate Professor at the School of Education, Language, and Psychology at York St John University, UK. Jelena graduated with a BSc in Psychology from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, and an MSc and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. While at Belgrade, she was a member of the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology at the Faculty of Philosophy. Jelena did her postdoctoral training at the University of York, UK, where she is an Honorary Research Fellow. Jelena’s research examines the cognitive mechanisms of language learning and use in adults and children, using computational and behavioral methods.