Research groups
Colleges
Biography
I am Professor in Experimental Psychology and Fellow of St. John's College (visit my St John's page here). My interests in children's language and literacy development began with my DPhil research at the University of York (1991-1994) which explored factors influencing spelling development. Following my DPhil, I stayed in York working as a Research Fellow for 5 years before being appointed Lecturer in Psychology at York in 1999. I moved to Oxford in 2002.
Kate Nation
BSc DPhil FBA
Professor of Experimental Psychology
- Fellow of St John's College
- Director of ReadOxford and Language and Cognitive Development Research Group
- Associate Head for Personnel
Development & Disorders
Research Summary
Broadly, my research is concerned with the language processing, especially reading development. I am interested in how children learn to read words and comprehend text, and more generally, the relationship between spoken language and written language. A key aim at present to specify some of the mechanisms involved in the transition from novice to expert. We also study language processing in skilled adults, addressing the issue of how skilled behaviour emerges via language learning experience.
For more information, visit our research hub at ReadOxford and our academic research group home page.
Find my Google Scholar research profile and citations here .
Follow me on twitter @ReadOxford.
Key publications
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Charting the frequency and diversity of emotion words in children’s language: written language matters
Journal article
Dong Y. and NATION K., (2025), First Language
Recent publications
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Charting the frequency and diversity of emotion words in children’s language: written language matters
Journal article
Dong Y. and NATION K., (2025), First Language
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Eye Tracking and Simulating the Spacing Effect during Orthographic Learning
Journal article
Wegener S. et al, (2025), Reading Research Quarterly
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Simultaneous learning of semantic and graphotactic regularities in spelling: An artificial orthography learning experiment
Preprint
Law NSH. et al, (2025)
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Learning new words via reading: The influence of emotional narrative context on learning novel adjectives.
Journal article
Dong Y. et al, (2024), Q J Exp Psychol (Hove)
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Learning from the input: a corpus-based investigation of Chinese classifiers in children’s books and child-directed speech
Preprint
Shi J. et al, (2024)