Professor Kate Nation

Professor Kate Nation FBA

Maggie Snowling Fellow in Psychology Provost for Academic Affairs Steward of SCR

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Biography

As Tutor for Psychology, I am responsible for making the arrangements for the Experimental Psychology (EP) and Psychology, Philosophy & Linguistics (PPL) students at St. John's. I provide undergraduate tutorials across all three years, covering a range of topics in psychology.  I also contribute to the Psychology for Medicine course. I’m College Advisor to a number of graduate students in College who are researching a wide variety of topics in psychology and neuroscience.  In the department, I give a 2nd year lecture course on Developmental Psychology and a 3rd year advanced course on Reading and Language: Development and Disorder.  I supervise postgraduate students working in the field of psycholinguistics (the psychology of language), especially written language.

Research Interests

I am based in the Department of Experimental Psychology.  Broadly, my research is concerned with the psychology of language, especially reading and its development.  I am interested in how children learn to read words and comprehend text, and more generally, the relationship between spoken language and written language. A key aim at present to specify some of the mechanisms involved in the transition from novice to expert. We also study language processing in skilled adults, addressing the issue of how skilled behaviour emerges via language learning experience. Alongside my research on typical development, I study language and cognitive processes in children with developmental disorders that impact on language and literacy development, including language impairment, autism and dyslexia.