Biography
I am a developmental psycholinguist interested in how children acquire language, and why some children find this easier than others. I am particularly interested in the development of reading mechanisms from childhood to adulthood.
Since 2026, I have been a postdoc at Queen Mary University of London, working on a project investigating early language and literacy development in multilingual children. The project examines how differences between children’s heritage languages and English shape phonological development and the foundations of reading, with a particular focus on Somali- and Sylheti-speaking children growing up in the UK.
From 2023 to 2026, I worked with Professor Kathleen Rastle at Royal Holloway, University of London, investigating children’s engagement with same-language subtitles and whether subtitle exposure can help children learn to read. This work combined a large-scale eye-tracking study with a longitudinal intervention study.
Previously, I held a permanent position of a Research Fellow at the Centre for Language and Brain at HSE University in Moscow, where I supervised behavioural and eye-tracking research in the Child Language Acquisition group. Across my research, I have worked with infants, typically developing children from preschool to adolescence, bilingual children, children with dyslexia, Developmental Language Disorder, autism spectrum disorder and Down syndrome, as well as adults.
Download my CV.
- Language development
- Reading development
- Individual differences
- Eye tracking
- Open science
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PhD in Linguistics, 2011
Lomonosov Moscow State University
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BA and MA in Philology (cum laude), 2008
Lomonosov Moscow State University