LangCog Seminar - Jo Taylor

Can neuroscience help us to understand how we learn to read?

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LangCog Seminar - Jo Taylor

12 Mar 2025, 13:00 – 14:00

118
Chandler House
London
WC1N 1PF
United Kingdom

In this talk I will discuss the challenges involved in learning to read and how cognitive theories of reading propose that we solve these challenges. In particular, I will explain that we can comprehend text either by associating the printed forms of words directly with their meanings, or by associating the printed forms of words with their pronunciations and then using our spoken language knowledge to link these pronunciations to meanings. I will then present two brain imaging experiments that attempt to answer the following questions: 1) Is it better to focus on word pronunciations or meanings when teaching reading? 2) Does the way in which we learn to read differ depending on the writing system we are learning (e.g., English vs. Chinese)? I will end by considering more generally how neuroscience can be a useful tool for understanding the mechanisms involved in a complex task like reading and what it might be able to tell us in future.

Dr Jo Taylor

Associate Professor

UCL

Jo gained her PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford in in 2009. Her thesis was entitled “The influence of frequency, consistency, and semantics on reading aloud: An artificial orthography paradigm, and was supervised by Professors Kate Nation and Kim Plunkett.

She then moved to the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge where she held an ESRC/MRC interdisciplinary postdoctoral fellowship as well as a Newnham College research fellowship. In collaboration with Dr Matt Davis and Professor Kathy Rastle, she conducted experiments to investigate the neural underpinnings of learning to read, as well as how brain activity during reading relates to cognitive theories. After four years in Cambridge she moved to Royal Holloway University of London as a postdoctoral fellow and co-investigator on an ESRC funded grant investigating how methods of reading instruction and the nature of the words we are learning influence their neural representations.

Prior to joining UCL she was a lecturer at Aston University in Birmingham.