Rajalakshmi Madhavan

Rajalakshmi (also known as Raji) commenced her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology with a focus on Neuropsychology at Bangor University in 2015, and graduated in 2018. Her final year dissertation investigated the role of native accents in language comprehension. She moved on to complete her MSc at the University of Edinburgh in 2018, where she studied Psychology of Language. For her Master’s thesis she investigated how disfluencies in non-native speech affected the prediction of upcoming words in speech. After completing her first master’s degree, she joined the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN) at UCL (University College London) as a Research Masters student of Cognitive Neuroscience in 2019, and became part of the Language and Cognition Lab headed by Professor Gabriella Vigliocco. She worked on a multidisciplinary project called Ecolang, which studies language learning and processing in real-world settings. Her MRes thesis focussed on how speaker gaze is modified in a naturalistic setting in caregiver-child interactions and adult-adult- interactions. In September 2020, she will join the Research Training Group 2070, “Understanding Social Relationships” and the Behaviour Cognition PhD programme to commence her PhD under Professor Nivedita Mani. Her work will investigate how infants’ intrinsic motivation coupled with the quality of input they receive will affect their language learning.