Meet the researcher: Jo Taylor

My research investigates the way we learn to read, in particular how we learn the relationship between a word’s spelling and its sound and meaning.

I often use artificial language learning methods, in which participants learn to read made-up words, sometimes written in unfamiliar alphabets. This enables me to simulate what it's like for children learning read words for the first time or how adults learn a foreign language. I use neuroimaging methods to look at how our brains represent words and am interested in how different factors affect learning, for example, how difficult the spelling-to-sound relationships are, how meaningful the words are, or the method we use to teach people