I am currently an Evidence and Evaluation Officer at Foundations – what works centre for children & families. Previously I was an ESRC post-doctoral fellow at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, working with Jenny Gibson and Napoleon Katsos on children’s pragmatic development. I was also a College Research Associate at Homerton College and Director of Studies in Linguistics at Hughes Hall.

In my research, I was interested in how children learn to understand other people, when what other people literally say is often not what they mean: my research was in developmental and experimental pragmatics. I believe that sharing this research and linguistics more generally with the wider community is beneficial for everyone, and I’m especially interested in how pragmatics research can be applied to inference teaching in the early years classroom. As a member of the Cambridge Bilingualism Network I’ve also explored the connection between speaking more than one language and family wellbeing, and aimed to provide useful resources for parents and practitioners alike: We Speak Multi is aimed at antenatal practitioners and multilingual families. Also, I sometimes get out and about with my harp.

You can contact me via email: elspeth @ elspethwilson.uk

@elspeth_wilson        https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6114-1294

… to the children, parents, teachers, schools & nurseries who took part in my PhD studies and postdoc project! You can now read or download a short guide to what I found.