Lauren McGuinness

Starting in 2017, Lauren completed both her BSc in Psychology and MSc in Developmental Psychology at the University of Kent. She is now a postgraduate researcher at the Kent Child Development Unit in the School of Psychology.

Lauren is primarily interested in the conversational abilities and pragmatic language use of both neurotypical and autistic children.

Her PhD research aims to further our understanding of how children use language to forge social bonds, and how certain conversational behaviours may encourage or dissuade others from engaging in future interactions with them. In particular, she investigates the role of response relevance and response timing in children’s social judgements of others, and their own conversational production. She also examines the appropriateness of the content of children’s responses, as well as the factors which may affect these behaviours, including the effect of speech rate and question predictability on children’s response latencies.

Supervisors

• Dr Kirsten Abbot-Smith (1st Supervisor)
• Dr David Kelly (2nd Supervisor) 

Funding

• Economic and Social Research Council (SeNSS 1+3 Studentship)

Honours and Awards

• The Kent Scholarship for Academic Excellence (2017)
• The Jean Piaget Prize for the Highest Overall Mark in MSc Developmental Psychology (2021)