Maria Korochkina

Assessing Text Experience in British Primary School Children: New Validated Title and Author Recognition Tests - Holly Cooper, Maria Korochkina, Marc Brysbaert, Kathleen Rastle, 2026 Becoming a skilled reader requires that children accumulate extensive experience with text through independent reading. Research shows that greater text experie...

**New** validated Title Recognition and Author Recognition Tests to measure text experience in primary school children, with Holly Cooper, @mariakna.bsky.social, and Marc Brysbaert. #OA @qjep.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Literacy

**New** chapter on “Literacy” just published in the Open Encyclopaedia of Cognitive Science. The whole series is super, accessible chapters and no paywalls, a great resource for teaching. oecs.mit.edu/pub/epclh9no...

Morphemes in the wild: Modelling affix learning from the noisy landscape of natural text Morphological knowledge serves as a powerful heuristic for vocabulary growth and contributes significantly to the speed and efficiency of reading. Whi…

*New paper* in JML, in which we use a compositional distributional semantic model to show that, although morphological patterns are quasiregular, natural text contains enough structure for learning important aspects of affix meanings (open access): www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

screenshot of my post

Big new blogpost!

My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more.

--> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful.
www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

<em>British Journal of Psychology</em> | Wiley Online Library In this commentary, I express my concern that the special issue focuses too much on the added value of AI for psychology, while psychological research also has much to offer, such as the operationali...

A really nice commentary by Marc Brysbaert on how we might - and perhaps should - reframe our thinking about the relationship between psychology research and AI research:
doi.org/10.1111/bjop...

Morpheme knowledge is shaped by information available through orthography - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review A large portion of words in a language are formed by combining smaller meaningful units called morphemes (e.g., teach + -er → teacher). Understanding a language’s morphology is vital for skilled readi...

*New paper* showing that adults’ morpheme knowledge in English is shaped by what readers can readily pick up from spelling, even when this means relying on cues that don’t accurately reflect morphological structure or overlooking informative exemplars
doi.org/10.3758/s134...

If we leave the acquisition of morphological knowledge to children's reading, what information is there in books to be acquired? @kathyrastle.bsky.social has answers (open). www.nature.com/articles/s41...

** New resource ** We analysed the characteristics of words in 1200 books suitable for children and young people. Properties of each word (frequencies, etc) are now available in an interactive website.
cyp-lex.rastlelab.com

What can children learn about morphology from reading for fun? A key part of becoming a skilled reader is understanding how words are built — that is, how small parts of words that carry meaning come together to form words. For example, the word unhappy is made u...

What can children learn about morphology when they read for pleasure? We analysed the words in 1200 books suitable for children and young people to find out! Read the blog post here: www.rastlelab.com/post/what-ca...

A computational analysis of lexical elaboration across languages | PNAS Claims about lexical elaboration (e.g. Mongolian has many horse-related terms) are widespread in the scholarly and popular literature. Here, we sho...

Just came across a super cool study on lexical elaboration measured using data from bilingual dictionaries: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.... There is even an interactive app that lets you explore how various concepts are elaborated across languages (relative to English): charleskemp.com/code/lexical...

Keir Starmer is caught in yet another trap of his own making | Rafael Behr The prime minister’s immigration approach follows a now-familiar pattern: letting fear of a difficult argument get in the way of policy that might work, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr

Column, on the prime minister who had room to manoeuvre and chose to besiege himself instead. Again. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

My study @surreypsychology.bsky.social @modilab-surrey.bsky.social is now live. Looking for typically developing children and children with #DCD / #Dyspraxia.
If you are a #School in Surrey, we can come to your classroom, please get in touch!
Please share widely 🙏

Morphology in children’s books, and what it means for learning - npj Science of Learning npj Science of Learning - Morphology in children’s books, and what it means for learning

*New paper* out in npj Science of Learning!
@kathyrastle.bsky.social and I take a deep dive into the fascinating intricacies of morphology and introduce a new account of how readers learn about the internal structure of words.
Read it here: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Where Do Children Look when Watching Videos with Same-Language Subtitles? Can same-language subtitles help children learn to read? Maybe, but only if children look at them.

Accessible blog post summarising the key findings is available at www.rastlelab.com/post/where-d....

Where Do Children Look When Watching Videos With Same-Language Subtitles? - Anastasiya Lopukhina, Walter J. B. van Heuven, Rebecca Crowley, Kathleen Rastle, 2025 Influential campaigns in the United Kingdom and the United States have argued that same-language television subtitles may help children learn to read. In this s...

Very important work led by the brilliant Anastasiya Lopukhina shows that widely publicised claims about subtitles helping children learn to read need to be tempered - just published in PsychScience: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Royal Society decides not to take disciplinary action against Elon Musk Exclusive: Fellows argue Musk has violated code of conduct but council believes investigation ‘could do more harm than good’

Abandoning everything you stood for, just to not make fascist billionaires and anti-science crusaders uncomfortable - well done, @royalsociety.org - it takes talent to be SO utterly pathetic and cowardly.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Our article (with @kathyrastle.bsky.social) on vocabulary in the English Lit GCSE is now out in The Use of English @englishassociation.bsky.social. We're very proud of this work and hopeful it contributes to GCSE reform for the benefit of pupils nationwide. Also available at doi.org/10.31219/osf....

Why academia is sleepwalking into self-destruction. My editorial @brain1878.bsky.social If you agree with the sentiments please repost. It's important for all our sakes to stop the madness
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

i've written a blog post about why I think we should reject generative AI in the university: languagemechanics.neocities.org/no-gen-ai

This Friday 4pm is my professorial inaugural "From Birds to Words: Onomatopoeia, Metaphor, and the Language of Birdsong" (w/ BSL interpretation).

There'll be a lot of iconicity in it! If you're interested, you can register for the webinar under this link:

www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edac...

Reviewer notes: Avoid any ambiguity about analysis aims For any central statistical analysis that you report in your manuscript, it should be absolutely clear for readers why the analysis is being conducted in the first place – that is, the analysis goal s...

New blog post!

Sometimes, when reviewing a manuscript, it's really unclear to me what precisely the authors are trying to do -- which makes it hard to evaluate the work properly.

So, here's some advice for how to ensure that readers don't get lost.
www.the100.ci/2025/02/17/r...

Open letter to the President of the Royal Society – time to stand up for your values If you wish to show your support for the letter below regarding apparent inaction by the Royal Society in the face of breaches of its code of conduct by Elon Musk FRS, please sign below. I invite anyo...

Now almost 450 signatories to my open letter calling on the @royalsociety.org to stand up for its values & deal with the widespread concerns raised by Elon Musk's Fellowship. Please consider signing & sharing: forms.gle/miDciq35oxyw...

List of signatories here: occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2025/...

Seven reasons for keeping Elon Musk as a Fellow of the Royal Society Last November, I wrote a blogpost explaining why I had resigned as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). In brief, over the summer a group ...

Latest blogpost on Musk/Royal Society debacle: deevybee.blogspot.com/2025/02/seve... I look at the reasons that have been given for inaction, and find them wanting. @royalsociety.org

Very good summary of all the insane stuff unfolding in the US- solidarity to all my colleagues over there

maybe saying that theoretical perspectives suggest XYZ, but that these theories haven't been extensively tested empirically so there's no clarity as to what should be done in practice?..

yeah, so perhaps just make this more explicit? I think the original sentence doesn't bring this point across

In fact, I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "an established way" here... Aren't lexical representations created and strengthened through experience with language? Nation's lexical legacy hypothesis would be relevant for this discussion I think?

why not phrase this in a simpler way, e.g., "lexical quality refers to the extent to which a word's representation specifies its sound, spelling, and meaning"? I think you should also cite Perfetti btw ;) I also agree with the comment above regarding "an established way" to create lexical reps.

Tbh, I find both the original and the revised statements wordy and confusing. It sounds like you are trying to summarise Perfetti's lexical quality hypothesis?

This amazing book is a must-have for schools!