A bit about Thea Cameron-Faulkner
I am a lecturer in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures at the University of Manchester. Before embarking on an academic career, I spent six years overseas (in Spain, Poland, Indonesia, and Hong Kong) working as an English Language teacher. Living and working overseas spurred me on to further study. I continued my studies in Linguistics as a postgraduate student at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and then conducted my PhD in School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester (funded by the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig). Since 2003 I have been employed as a lecturer in child language development and have worked in the disciplines of Linguistics, Psychology, and Early Childhood Studies. I was awarded Chartered Psychologist status (CPsychol.) from the British Psychological Society in 2010.
My research focuses on the development of human communication and language. I am interested in the ways in which communication and language interact with social, cultural, and environmental factors. I use of range of methods in my work but typically focus on the analysis of real world recordings of caregiver-child interaction.
My Role in LuCiD
I lead a project investigating language and literacy practices in low socio-economic status multilingual families.
In phase 1, I led Work Package 1.4, Investigating prelinguistic development in three minority cultures. I was also a Co-Investigator on the Language 0-5 longitudinal project, supporting the 11 month study of prelinguistic gestures.
Currently, in phase 2 of LuCiD, I am leading Work Package 2.4, The effects of the individual, home, and community on language development in UK families.
LuCiD publications (17) by Thea Cameron-Faulkner
Ambridge, B., McCauley, S. M., Bannard, C., Davis, M., Cameron-Faulkner, T., Gummery, A., & Theakston, A. (2023). Uninversion error in English-speaking children’s wh-questions: Blame it on the bigrams? Language Development Research, 3 (1), pp. 121-155.
McCauley, S.M., Bannard, C., Theakston, A., Davis, M., Cameron-Faulkner, T., & Ambridge, B. (2021). Multiword units lead to errors of commission in children's spontaneous production: “What corpus data can tell us? Developmental Science, 24: e13125.
Cameron-Faulkner, T., Malik, N., Steele, C., Coretta, S., Serratrice, L. & Lieven, E. V. M. (in press) (2020). A cross cultural analysis of early prelinguistic gesture development and its relationship to language development. Child Development.
McCauley, S.M., Bannard, C., Theakston, A., Davis, M., Cameron-Faulkner, T., & Ambridge, B. (2019). Multiword units predict non-inversion errors in children’s wh-questions: “What corpus data can tell us? In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freksa (Eds.) Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Okuno, A., Cameron-Faulkner, T. R., & Theakston, A. L. (2019). Crosslinguistic Differences in the Encoding of Causality: Transitivity Preferences in English and Japanese Children and Adults. Language Learning and Development, DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2019.1685387
Bidgood, A., Cameron-Faulkner, T., Durrant, S., Peter, M., Rowland, C. (2015). Multimodal input and children's gesture and vocabulary growth. Workshop on Extensive and Intensive Recordings of Children's Language Environment (WEIRCLE), Paris, France.
Bidgood, A., Cameron-Faulkner, T., Peter, M., Durrant, S., Rowland, C. (2016). The role of showing and pointing in the vocabulary growth of children aged 8-15 months. International Conference on Infant Studies, New Orleans, USA.
Noble, C., Cameron-Faulkner, T., Lieven, E. (2017). Keeping it simple: The grammatical properties of hsared book reading. Journal of Child Language, 45(3), 753-766.
Boundy, L., Cameron-Faulkner, T., Theakston, A. (2016). Exploring early communicative behaviours: A fine-grained analysis of infant shows and gives. Infant Behaviour & Development, 44, 86-97.
Bidgood, A., Cameron-Faulkner, T., Durrant, S., Peter, M. & Rowland, C.F. (2016). The role of gestures and babble in the vocabulary growth of children aged 8-18 months. Paper presented at the 1st Lancaster Conference on Infant and Child Development, Lancaster, UK.
Theakston, A., Davis, M. & Cameron-Faulkner, T. (2016). It’s raining, isn’t it? Children’s use of tag questions as a test case for the role of form-function mappings in early language acquisition. Proceedings of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, p.154.
Michelle Davis, Thea Cameron-Faulkner,& Anna Theakston (2015). Exploring patterns in tag question production: A multiple correspondence analysis of form and function. Paper presented at the Child Language Symposium, Warwick, UK
Akiko Okuno, Thea Cameron-Faulkner, & Anna Theakston (2015). How does the world look to you? Paper presented at the Child Language Symposium, Warwick,UK
Boundy, L., Cameron-Faulkner, T. and Theakston, A. (2018). Intention or Attention Before Pointing: Do Infants’ Early Holdout Gestures Reflect Evidence of a Declarative Motive? Infancy. DOI: 10.1111/infa.12267
Cameron-Faulkner, T., Macdonald, R., Serratrice, L., Melville, J., & Gattis, M. (2017). Plant Yourself Where Language Blooms: Direct Experience of Nature Changes How Parents and Children Talk about Nature. Children, Youth and Environments, 27 (2), 110-124.
Cameron-Faulkner, T., Theakston, A., Lieven, E., Tomasello, M. (2015). The Relationship Between Infant Holdout and Gives, and Pointing Infancy, 20, 5, 576-586
Boundy, L., Cameron-Faulkner, T. & Theakston, A. (2015). Exploring early proto-declarative behaviours: A fine-grained analysis of infant's early shows and gives. Poster presented at Gesture in Language Development Workshop, Warwick, 2015.