Sally Andrews

My research is based in cognitive psychology but integrates theories and methods from the domains of computer science, philosophy and neuroscience – the fields that define the discipline of cognitive science. As an individual researcher, and in collaboration with students and researchers from a range of disciplines, I have used a variety of methodologies to investigate how both healthy individuals and people suffering from psychiatric disorders attend to and analyse words and sentences.

The central focus of my research has been on lexical processing and its relationship to reading skill: how do skilled language users represent and retrieve their knowledge about the words; how do these cognitive capabilities develop; and how does lexical processing contribute to reading skill. My research has focused primarily on English, but I have also collaborated in research projects comparing speakers of different languages to determine how the characteristics of different writing systems, and their relationship to phonology and semantics, influences language processing.