Leone Buckle received her BSc in Psychology and Philosophy from the University of Liverpool. She then obtained both her MRes and PhD degrees in Psychology from the University of Manchester on an ESRC-funded studentship. Her PhD aimed to bridge links between developmental psychology, psycholinguistics and linguistic theory by investigating how interactions between semantics and syntax facilitate children’s sentence processing. She subsequently worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick on the ESRC-funded Language Experience and Development Project, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh. This project explored how immediate experiences of hearing speech in different contexts can support language learning over the course of development. Leone has since returned to the University of Manchester where she is now a Lecturer in Psychology.

• PSYC10421: Introduction to Cognition
• PSYC30920 Final Year Project
• PSYC31121: Language and Communicative Development in Educational Settings

Leone is interested in the role of the environment on linguistic development. She particularly focuses on how prior experiences of other people’s language use, and experiences of viewing real-life events can help children produce and interpret language with adult-like competence. Her research typically examines how speakers integrate various linguistic cues (e.g., word order, noun animacy) and social cues (e.g., interlocutor identity) during conversational interactions to facilitate sentence processing. She has also recently begun investigating children’s and parents’ views on the representation of diversity in children’s literature and seeks to explore how this impacts children’s propensity to learn from these resources. Leone uses a range of methodological approaches (including syntactic priming, eye-tracking, corpus analysis and questionnaires) employed either in-person or online to address these research topics.