Professor Kate Nation FBA

Born and raised in the West Midlands, I stumbled on 'the science of the mind’ by accident. It seemed a happy union between my interests in biology and human communication, and it led me to study Psychology at the University of York. It turned out that both York and Psychology suited me well. Three years as an undergraduate turned into a doctorate which turned into research fellowship and then a lectureship. All in, I left York more than a decade later than initially planned, moving south to take up my Tutorial Fellowship at St John’s in 2002. I was promoted to Professor of Experimental Psychology in 2006 and am a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the British Academy. There’s a bit more about me here.

Teaching

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.

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.