Ernesto is interested in several aspects of language learning, cognition and education in different international settings, especially in the Global South. He is currently a Research Officer for TalkTogether, a UKRI GCRF-funded research project based at the Department of Education at the University of Oxford.
Ernesto holds a PhD in Psycholinguistics for his experimental and corpus-informed work on the interaction between children’s working memory and subject-verb agreement. He has been employed in different capacities as a researcher/teacher by the Open University (UK), University of Westminster and the University of Havana.
He has acted as a resource person on IDRC-funded large-scale projects led by PI Freda Wolfenden, working with education researchers, experts and stakeholders in Latin America and the Caribbean (Honduras, Jamaica, Argentina, Colombia), Africa (Ghana, Rwanda, Malawi, Kenya) and Asia (India, Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Pakistan, Vietnam).
Publications
Roque-Gutierrez, Ernesto and Ibbotson, Paul (2023). Working memory training improves children’s syntactic ability but not vice versa: A randomized control trial. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 227, article no. 105593. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105593
Ibbotson, Paul and Roque-Gutierrez, Ernesto (2023). The Development of Working Memory: Sex Differences in Accuracy and Reaction Times. Journal of Cognition and Development (Early Access). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2023.2178437
Gimenez, Julio; Baldwin, Mark; Breen, Paul; Green, Julia; Roque Gutierrez, Ernesto; Paterson, Richard; Pearson, Jayne; Percy, Martin; Specht, Doug and Waddell, Guy (2020). Reproduced, reinterpreted, lost: Trajectories of scientific knowledge across contexts. Text & Talk, 40(3) pp. 293–324. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2020-2059
Prior to joining TalkTogether, Hannah worked at the intersection of education and international development. Her work focused on designing and evaluating interventions and programmes targeting children, teachers and parents in low- and middle-income countries.
Hannah is fluent in Kiswahili and is particularly interested in the influence of language, culture and environment on early childhood development, especially socio-emotional skills. Hannah gained an MSc in Education and Child Development from the University of Oxford, and a BA Hons in African Studies and Swahili from SOAS, University of London.
Henry is a Swire Scholar and is currently reading for a DPhil in Education at the University of Oxford. His doctoral research is fully funded by the Swire Charitable Trust and St Antony’s College.
Henry’s research interests lie primarily in classroom dynamics, specifically the interaction of cognitive, affective and motivational experiences in education settings. His DPhil research seeks the rapprochement between the dominant nomothetic (group-focus) approach in the field of education and psychology with the idiographic (person-focus) approach, which is mostly overlooked. Henry is also interested in advanced quantitative methods (e.g., Dynamic Structural Equation Modelling) and analysing ambulatory assessment data.
Prior to starting his DPhil, Henry undertook a placement year as a research assistant in the Child Development and Learning research group at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, whilst completing his BSc in Psychology at the University of Surrey. He continued and completed his MSc in Education (Child Development and Education) at the University of Oxford.
Publications
Lo, H. T. F. 2022. Children’s Momentary Executive Function Fluctuation in Real-World Classrooms: An Intensive Longitudinal Study. MSc Dissertation. University of Oxford, U.K.
Haoran obtained a bachelor’s degree in Education Studies at University College London. After that, she completed her master’s degree in Early Childhood Education at Columbia University.
Publications
- Luo, H., Yang, W., & Zeng, Y. (2022). A video-based approach to investigating intentional teaching of mathematics in Chinese kindergartens. Teaching And Teacher Education, 114, 103716. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2022.103716
- Yang, W., Luo, H., & Su, J. (2022). Towards inclusiveness and sustainability of robot programming in early childhood: Child engagement, learning outcomes and teacher perception. British Journal Of Educational Technology, 53(6), 1486-1510. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13266
Anushay is a second-year DPhil student investigating how classroom characteristics are related to Pakistani children’s development. She is supervised by Professor Iram Siraj and Dr Katharina Ereky-Stevens and her work is being supported by the Aga Khan University (Pakistan). Anushay received the Patrice Engle Dissertation Grant Award from the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) in 2023.
Anushay completed her BSc Psychology from UCL, where she also started her master’s in Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology. She was based at Yale University for her master’s thesis, where she worked with Dr Craig Bailey at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence to understand children’s emotion development. Anushay also works as a part-time research assistant at the Developmental Diversity Lab at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Anushay’s research interests include understanding child development across different cultures, factors that might be affecting it, and devising culture-specific ways to support children’s holistic development through the educational system. She is also keen on improving the research scope in Pakistan by working with Pakistani researchers, practitioners, and families. Anushay balances her research with her position as the founder of a non-profit, Resources for Children, which aims to understand and support children’s development in Pakistan.
Publications
Journal Articles
- Mazhar, A., & Bailey, C., S. (under review). Understanding Children’s Emotion-Specific Biases: How They Relate to Child and Family Factors, Emotion Recognition Accuracy, and Social Behaviour.
Presentations
- Mazhar, A., & Bailey, C., S. (2023, March). Understanding Children’s Emotion-Specific Biases: How They Relate to Child-Level Factors and Emotion Recognition Accuracy [Paper Presentation]. Society for Research in Child Development, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States.
- Mazhar, A. (2022, April). Understanding children’s emotion-specific biases and how they relate to age, gender, and emotion recognition. Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence Spring Preview, New Haven, United States.
- Mazhar, A. (2021, December). Does an extended family improve mentalising in Autistic Children: a cross-cultural perspective from UK & Pakistan. 2nd International Foundation University Conference of Psychology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
- Mazhar, A. (2020, October). Developing a non-profit to advance autism research in Pakistan. Anna Freud Centre Seminar Series, London, United Kingdom.
Posters
- Mazhar, A. (2021, November). Theory of Mind in Autistic Children: a cross-cultural perspective from UK and Pakistan. Harvard Trends in Psychology Summit, Cambridge, United States.
- Mazhar, A. (2021, November). Understanding children’s emotion-specific biases and how they relate to age, gender, and emotion recognition. Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence Research Rounds, New Haven, United States.
Athina is a Research Officer working on TalkTogether: Supporting Oral Language Development.
The project investigates children’s oral language in multilingual urban poor contexts, with an aim to develop and evaluate an intervention programme for kindergarten classes. TalkTogether is an international collaboration led by Prof. Sonali Nag and involves academic and non-academic partners in India.
Athina completed her PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge being awarded a PhD Studentship from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. Before her PhD, Athina obtained a MA in Linguistics from the Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. During her MA studies, she did an internship at the University of Amsterdam where she was involved in testing bilingual children and used the data to write her MA thesis on the occurrence of cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of grammatical gender by Greek-Dutch bilingual children. She also worked as a student assistant for three months at the Center for Language and Speech Technology of the Radboud University of Nijmegen with her task being the preparation of a literature overview of the indicators investigated and reported in the literature to predict L2 oral proficiency, as well as, a review of the systems (manual and automatic) used to evaluate speaking proficiency. She holds a BA in Greek Philology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. During her BA, she also spent an academic year at the University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain as a student being awarded an Erasmus scholarship. Finally, she has a CELTA (Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and has some teaching experience with children and adults in various settings (immigrant populations, undergraduates, foreign and repatriated students).
In her previous research, she investigated age (of onset) and first language effects on the acquisition of English grammar (focusing on finiteness) by Chinese and Russian child learners in a minimal input EFL (English as a Foreign Language) context. During her current role, she is involved in various research projects within TalkTogether all focusing on shedding light on child oral language development of (Kannada-speaking) children and/or aiming to support their oral language development through interventions.
Her research interests involve child (second) language acquisition with a particular interest in the development of morphosyntax, the factors both linguistic and contextual that shape it, and the support of oral language development through classroom interventions to help children be ‘readier’ for literacy and school.
Conference Papers
- ‘Age in child L2 acquisition: The case of finiteness’ (In collaboration with Theodora Alexopoulou, Henriette Hendriks, Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge). Paper presented at the EuroSLA 28 conference, Munster, Germany, September 5-8, 2018.
- ‘The acquisition of finiteness in English by Chinese and Russian speaking children: the impact of age’ (In collaboration with Theodora Alexopoulou, Henriette Hendriks, Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge). Paper presented at the workshop: ‘Age effects in bilingual language acquisition’ in Poznan, Poland, March 7-8, 2019.
- ‘The acquisition of finiteness in English by Chinese and Russian speaking children: the impact of L1 (In collaboration with Theodora Alexopoulou, Henriette Hendriks, Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge). Paper presented at the workshop: ‘Tenselessness II’ in Lisbon, Portugal, October 3-4, 2019.
Poster presentations
- Age in child L2 acquisition: The case of finiteness (In collaboration with Theodora Alexopoulou, Henriette Hendriks, Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge). Poster presented at the Lead summer school for L2 acquisition, University of Tübingen, Germany, July 23-27, 2018.
- Age in child L2 acquisition: The case of finiteness (In collaboration with Theodora Alexopoulou, Henriette Hendriks, Ianthi Maria Tsimpli, University of Cambridge). Poster presented at the School on Experimental and Corpus Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, September 25-27, 2018.
Mirna Sumatic is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis is focused on student-teacher interactions and child-parent relationship quality.
Her research interests lie particularly in the moment-to-moment perceptions and fluctuations of these relationships and interactions, and how best for teachers and parents to support children’s learning in school and at home. Theoretically, Mirna is interested in applying and integrating attachment and motivation theories to her research.
Prior to starting her DPhil, Mirna completed her BSc in Psychology at the University of Bath and went on to complete her MSc in Child Development and Education at the Department of Education, University of Oxford.
Siyu Ma is a DPhil student in child development and learning at the Department of Education. Her doctoral research focuses on second-born children under the Chinese two-child policy, especially how siblings play a role in the socio-emotional, language, and early literacy development of these children.
Prior to starting her Dphil, Siyu completed an MSc in Education (Research Design and Methodology) at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Sonali Nag. Her MSc dissertation explored the roles of social background and home literacy environment in the language and literacy development of a Wales subsample from the Millennium Cohort Study and was awarded a High Distinction. She also holds a BSc degree with first-class honours in Psychology from the University of Bath.
Siyu is also a research associate working on TalkTogether, a UKRI GCRF-funded research project based at the Department of Education.
At TalkTogether, Siyu is responsible for designing online surveys and analysing quantitative data from child assessments and parent reports.
Publications
Ma, S. (2021). Family background and home literacy environment as predictors of the early literacy development of children in Wales – findings from the Millennium Cohort Study (Master’s thesis, University of Oxford).