Holly Branigan

Professor

Psychology
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Tel: 0131 651 5436
Email: holly.branigan@ed.ac.uk

Street: Room S13, Psychology Building
City: 7 George Square, Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9JZ

Biography

Background

My main interests are in language production (especially syntactic processing) in both monolinguals and bilinguals: how do people represent the grammar of their first language or a second language, and how do they choose between alternative syntactic structures? I'm also interested in dialogue, including human-computer interaction, and how factors such as speakers' personality traits and their beliefs about their listeners affect their behaviour. More recently, I've begun to work on language processing in children: do children represent and process language, particularly syntax, in the same way as adults? I am always happy to hear from prospective PhD students who would be interested in working on any of these (or related) topics. If you are a parent interested in learning more about our child development research, you might want to check out the Wee Science website.

Representative publications

Tobar-Henriquez, A., Rabagliati, H., & Branigan, H.P. (2021). Speakers extrapolate community-level knowledge from individual linguistic encounters. Cognition, 210.
Hopkins, Z.L., & Branigan, H.P. (2020). Children show selectively increased language imitation after experiencing ostracism. Developmental Psychology,56, 897-911.
Castillo, L., Smith, K., & Branigan, H.P. (2019). Interaction promotes the adaptation of referential conventions to the communicative context. Cognitive Science, 43.
Huang, J., Chen, X., Pickering, M.J., Cai, Z., Wang, S., & Branigan, H.P. (2019). Does language similarity affect representational integration? Cognition, 165, 83-90.
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
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

Teaching & PhD supervision

Undergraduate teaching

Teaching: My teaching includes the 1st year course on Psychology of Language, the 4th year Language Production course and the MSc Dialogue course. My student consultation hours are Wednesday 9-11, or feel free to email me to arrange a time.