Rajalakshmi Madhavan

Rajalakshmi (called Raji) successfully defended her PhD thesis in August 2024 and is now a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. Her personal website can be found at the following link: https://sites.google.com/view/rajalakshmi-s-madhavan/about-me

Raji earned her bachelor's degree in Psychology with a focus on Neuropsychology, from Bangor University in 2018, and proceeded to complete her Master's degree in 2019 at the University of Edinburgh. In her first master's thesis, she examined how native speakers make predictions about disfluencies in a non-native person's speech.

After her time in Edinburgh, she studied at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (University College London) and was part of the working group “Language and Cognition”. Here, she worked on a multidisciplinary project called Ecolang, which examines language acquisition and language processing under natural conditions. Raji's second master thesis investigated how a how speaker gaze in a naturalistic interaction is modified in caregiver-child versus adult-adult- interactions.

From September 2020 to August 2024, Raji has been a doctoral student at the Psychology of Language department at the University of Göttingen. In her doctoral thesis, she examined how the quality of input young children receive interacts with their intrinsic motivation to learn language to influence developmental milestones.

In addition, Raji was a member of the DFG Research Training Group 2070 "Understanding of social relationships" and the Leibniz ScienceCampus Primate Cognition.