Departmental homepageProfessor Goswami first came to St Johns in 1990. She has made fundamental contributions during her career to understanding how individual differences in children's 'phonological awareness' (of word sound structure) underpin reading development and dyslexia across languages, via studies spanning from neuron to classroom. Her work identified a novel sensory cause of impaired phonological processing in dyslexia, based on discriminating amplitude modulation (AM) cues (varying loudness cues) in speech. She showed that sensitivity to speech AM structure governed individual differences in phonological development for children and infants across languages, and also conducted the world's first neuroimaging studies of neural encoding of AMs by children.
She was able to identify a core neural AM encoding impairment in dyslexia, present from infancy. Goswami's research led to her being awarded the largest research prize for educational research in the world, the Yidan Prize (2019). Her aspiration is to capitalise on the neural insights into language acquisition and dyslexia achieved by her research to now develop technological innovations that will improve language learning and reading acquisition for all the world's children.
Professor Goswami supervises PhD students in Psychology, and gives lectures for 2nd- and 3rd-year courses in PBS.
Recently, she has been studying the neural mechanisms underpinning language encoding in babies and children, and relationships to the AM-led rhythmic structure of infant- and child-directed speech. She is also designing Brain-Computer Interfaces for dyslexia, and other technological aids such as AM-enhanced speech.
Goswami, U., Thomson, J., Richardson, U., Stainthorp, R., Hughes, D, Rosen, S. & Scott, S.K. (2002) Amplitude envelope onsets and developmental dyslexia: A new hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99 (16), 10911-10916.
Goswami, U. (2011) A temporal sampling framework for developmental dyslexia. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15 (1), 3-10.
DiLiberto, G.M., Attaheri, A., Cantisani, G., Reilly, R.B., Ní Choisdealbha, A., Rocha, S., Brusini, P., & Goswami, U. (2023) Emergence of the cortical encoding of phonetic features in the first year of life. Nature Communications, 14, 7789.
Araújo, J., Simons, B.D., Peter, V., Mandke, K., Kalashnikova, M., Macfarlane, A., Gabrielczyk, F., Wilson, A.M., Di Liberto, G.M., Burnham, D., & Goswami, U. (2024) Atypical low-frequency cortical encoding of speech identifies children with developmental dyslexia. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 18, 1403667.
