Elizabeth Wonnacott

Professor of Language Science

About me

Prior to coming to the Department of Education Oxford, Liz held positions as an Associate Professor in the Division of Language Sciences at UCL and an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Warwick.

She was previously at Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow housed in the Department of Experimental Psychology and Linacre College. Her degrees are in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence (University of Edinburgh;  MA Hons) and Brain and Cognitive Sciences (University of Rochester, USA; MSc & PhD). Between her degrees, she worked briefly as Teacher of English to students of other languages.

Broadly speaking, Liz is interested in human language learning. Her research explores the extent to which this rests on input-driven, statistical learning processes, both in the context of learning a first native language, and in learning further languages in later childhood or adulthood. She is interested in learning that occurs both in naturalistic contexts and in input-limited contexts (such as the classroom), as well in the educational implications of statistical learning approaches for modern foreign language instruction. She also has an interest in the development of literacy and in language processing.

From a theoretical perspective, Liz has recently become interested in whether human language may be understood in terms of discriminative learning — a well-understood theory of learning developed in the study of animal learning. This work is funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust.

See also Language Learning Lab – https://languagelearninglab.web.ox.ac.uk/

Subjects Taught

  • MSc in Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition
  • MSc in Applied Linguistics for Language Teaching

Doctoral Applications

Elizabeth would welcome informal contacts from prospective doctoral students interested in the following topics:

  • Input driven/statistical learning approaches to first and second language learning
  • Language learning in the primary school years
  • Differences between implicit and explicit language learning, and educational implications
  • Age differences in language learning
  • Discriminative linguistics
  • Phonetic training in children and adults
  • Computational modelling of language learning