Holly Branigan (FRSE)

Professor

  • Psychology
  • School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Contact details

Address

Street

Room S13, Psychology Building

City
7 George Square, Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9JZ

Biography

Background

After a BA (Hons) in Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York, I received an MSc in Cognitive Science and Natural Language and a PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh. I held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Psychology at the University of Glasgow and subsequently the University of Edinburgh, where I also held a Leverhulme/British Academy Senior Research Fellowship.  I am now Professor of Psychology of Language and Cognition. I'm also an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Research Interests

language production; dialogue; language development; bilingualism; human-computer interaction

I am interested in how all kind of speakers (children and adults, monolingual and bilingual, neurotypical and neurodiverse) learn, represent and use words and grammar to communicate with other people (and computers). My research often uses interactive games in which people have to use language to solve tasks.

Representative publications

  1. Fazekas, J., Buckle, L., & Branigan, H.P. (2025). Hedgehog pillows and squirrel plates: Priming semantic structure in children's comprehension. Language Learning. 

  2. Doyle, P. R., Gessinger, I., Edwards, J., Clark, L., Dumbleton, O., Garaialde, D., Rough, D., Bleakley, A., Branigan, H. P. & Cowan, B. R. (2025). The Partner Modelling Questionnaire: A validated self-report measure of perceptions toward machines as dialogue partners.  ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 32. DOI: 10.1145/3729170

  3. Brough, J., Harris, L. T., Wu, S. H., Branigan, H. P. & Rabagliati, H. (2024). Cognitive causes of ‘like me’ race and gender biases in human language production. Nature Human Behaviour, 8, 1706-1715. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01943-3.

  4. Vega-Mendoza, M., Ivanova, I., McLean, J., Pickering, M. J. & Branigan, H. P. (2024). Lexically-specific syntactic restrictions in second-language speakers. Journal of Memory and Language, 134. DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2023.104470

  5. Tobar-Henriquez, A., Rabagliati, H., & Branigan, H.P. (2021). Speakers extrapolate community-level knowledge from individual linguistic encounters. Cognition, 210.

  6. Hopkins, Z.L., & Branigan, H.P. (2020). Children show selectively increased language imitation after experiencing ostracism. Developmental Psychology,56, 897-911.

  7. Hopkins, Z., Yuill, N., & Branigan, H.P. (2017). Inhibitory control and lexical alignment in children with an autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58, 1155-1165. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12792

  8. Branigan, H.P., & Pickering, M. J. (2017). An experimental approach to linguistic representation. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, e282. [Target article]. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X160020

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I am always happy to hear from prospective students. Please feel free to contact me with a short outline of your proposed research topic and how it relates to my areas of expertise (see "Research" tab for more information).

Current PhD students supervised

 

Research summary

language production; dialogue; language development; bilingualism; human-computer interaction

My main interests are in language production (syntactic and lexical representation/processing) and dialogue, including human-computer interaction. I use behavioural methods to study  questions such as how and why conversational partners repeat each other's language choices (alignment), how children learn language through interaction, how and why bilingual speakers switch between languages, how and why speakers' beliefs about their (human or computer/artificial) conversational partners affect their language use, and how speakers choose between alternative syntactic structures. My research encompasses monolinguals and bilinguals , children and adults, neurotypical and neurodiverse populations.  I am always happy to hear from prospective PhD students who would be interested in working on any of these (or related) topics - please contact me with an outline of the topic in which you are interested and how it relates to my areas of expertise. 

Current project grants

Input and uptake in childhood bilingualism and language disorders (with Professor Vicky Chondrogianni). Leverhulme Trust

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