Profile

I’m originally from the Netherlands, but live in London with a housemate and about 25 plants.  When not at work, I like to read science fiction and fantasy books, being involed in an LGBTQIA+ society, playing the piano, or discovering more of London on my bike.

I work in language and speech learning. I’m particularly interested in learning how we learn to hear and say the difference between sounds we don’t have in our own languages, but also in how we learn the different parts of a foreign language that might be different from our own, like the order we put the words in. I’m also doing work on finding out what kind of things help adults and children in learning languages, and whether they find different things helpful.  This means I normally go into primary schools and have the pupils there play language games to see how they learn, which is lots of fun!

Most of my day will involve sitting at my desk trying to think about experiments I can run, doing analyses on data that I’ve collected, or trying to write up what things I’ve found. If I’m still collecting the data I might be in a primary school getting pupils to play language games. I also spend a lot of time teaching students about how children learn and develop, so I might be standing at the front of a big classroom trying to explain things to my students as well! At the moment all of this happens on my computer of course, so I spend lots of time in virtual classrooms trying to help my students learn more about language and development.