Education:

• 2009 PhD Developmental Psycholinguistics, University of Edinburgh.
• 2005 MSc (Dist.) Developmental Linguistics, University of Edinburgh.
• 2003 BA Hons (1st) French Studies and Linguistics, University of Lancaster. 

Research:

I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow working in the Psychology Department at the University of Edinburgh, investigating implicit learning effects of syntactic priming in children.

Previously I was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Illinois' Psychology Department, in Prof. Cynthia Fisher's Language Acquisition Lab. My postdoctoral research there examined young children's comprehension and acquisition of syntactic structures through novel-verb preferential-looking experiments.

I completed my PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2009. My PhD research was funded by the ESRC and used syntactic priming to examine children's representation and production of passive sentences.

Other work:

Book Review Editor, First Language

Affiliations:

International Association for the Study of Child Language

Society for Research in Child Development

Society for Language Development

ECAP Network

Publications:

Messenger, K., Branigan, H.P. & McLean, J.F. (2012). Is children's acquisition of the passive a staged process? Evidence from six- and nine-year-olds' production. Journal of Child Language 39(5), 991-1016.

Messenger, K., Branigan, H.P., McLean, J.F. & Sorace, A. (2012). Is young children's passive syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and Language 66(4), 568–587.

Messenger, K., Branigan, H.P. & McLean, J.F. (2011). Evidence for (shared) abstract structure underlying children's short and full passives. Cognition 121(2), 268-274.

Please visit my web page for a full publications list.