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 and was promoted to Professor of Experimental Psychology in 2006.
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
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. Key aims at present are to specify some of the mechanisms involved in the transition from novice to expert, and to better understand how experience with written language emerges and serves to drive development through childhood and into adolescence. 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.
Recent publications
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Corpora of children’s books
Chapter
NATION K., (2025), International Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics
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Language and beyond: a registered report examining single and multiple risk models of later reading comprehension weaknesses
Journal article
James E. et al, (2025), Developmental Science
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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, (2025)
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Directing internal attention during sentence reading
Preprint
Watt RL. et al, (2025)
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Directing internal attention during sentence reading
Preprint
Watt RL. et al, (2025)