Glenn Williams

About Me

Hi, I'm a psycholinguist working as an Assistant Professor in Psychology at Northumbria University in the North-East of England.

I graduated from Northumbria University in 2011 and 2012, obtaining my BSc (Hons) Psychology and MRes Language & Cognition degrees respectively. In 2016 I graduated with a PhD in Psychology at the University of Dundee under the supervision of Dr. Yuki Kamide. Following this, I worked as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow on a Leverhulme funded grant with Prof Vera Kempe at Abertay University, Dundee. Most recently I spent three years at the University of Sunderland as a Lecturer in Psychology before I was appointed as Assistant Professor in Psychology at Northumbria University in August 2022.

My research interests are centred on language processing and literacy acquisition. I'm exploring how we represent (spatial) events as discourse unfolds, and how this influences the accessibility of discourse referents during processing. I'm also interested in how exposure to a dialect influences literacy acquisition, language comprehension, and production.

I have expertise in advanced statistical methods, including Bayesian inference, and extensive experience in using the R programming language for statistical analysis.

Eye-tracking

I have experience with using head-mounted (e.g. EyeLink-II), desk mounted (e.g. EyeLink 1000/1000+), and portable (e.g. Positive Science) eye-trackers in my research and public outreach activities.

Web-based research

At the language lab at Abertay, our current projects are entirely web-based (distributed via Amazon's Mechanical Turk/Prolific Academic). Check out a demo of our artificial literacy learning experiment.

R Stats

I'm interested in statistics and data processing in R. I recently developed and delivered 10, 2-hour lessons teaching R for Psychological Research. Follow the link to see the the course content in an ebook format.

Projects

You can find my most recent projects below. I'll regularly update this section by adding additional projects as they come along.

Data Science for Psychologists

An open ebook and course in data science focusing on reproducible research practices using R. This is an updated version of the r4psych course which is currently under construction.

R tutorial for Psychologists

An open ebook aimed at teaching R for psychological research. This book covers processing and transforming raw data up to calculating a range of statistical tests and producing plots.

Gruffalo Index of Language Variation

A corpus analysis of 'The Gruffalo' and 'The Gruffalo's Child' and their Scots translations covering how (and how often) Scots varieties differ from Standard British English.

Miniature Artificial Language Learning

A demo of our online artificial literacy learning experiment. Here, we teach people to read and write in an artificial language. We're interested in how exposure to dialect variants between training affects learning.

Numerical Stroop Task

An online numerical Stroop task that runs entirely on the client side (no data is stored on a server). A table of results is generated at the end of the experiment. Try this for lab demonstrations!

Publications

Williams, G. P., Kirk, N. W., Sánchez, L. M., Afshar, Z., Wen, Y., & Declerck, M. (submitted). Shared or separate: Control processes of cross- and within-language interference.

Buchanan, E. M., Maxwell, N. P., Montefinese, M., Taylor, J. E., Valentine, K. D., Cuccolo, K.,...Coles, N. (submitted). SPAML: Semantic priming across many languages. Nature Human Behavior.

Wetherell, M. A., Williams, G., & Doran, J. (2024). Assessing the psychobiological demands of high-fidelity training in pre-hospital emergency medicine. Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine, 32 (101), 1-12.

Hodgetts, S., Butler, J., & Williams, G. P. (2023). Time spent playing video games during periods of isolation has no effect on loneliness or mental health. Behaviour & Information Technology, 1-22.

Dunne, S., Williams, G. P., Bradbury, C., Keyes, T., Lane, A., Yang, K., & Ellison, A. (2023). Uncovering the social determinants of brain injury rehabilitation. Journal of Health Psychology 28 (10), 956-969.

Williams, G. P., Panayotov, N., & Kempe, V. (2022). Exposure to dialect variation in an artificial language prior to literacy training impairs reading of words with competing variants but does not affect decoding skills. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 48 (12), 1868-1904.

Williams, G. P., Panayotov, N., & Kempe, V. (2020). How does dialect exposure affect learning to read and spell? An artificial orthography study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149 (12), 2344-2375.

Williams, G. P., Kukona, A., & Kamide (2019). Spatial narrative context modulates semantic (but not visual) competition during discourse processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 108, 104030.

Chen, S-C., Szabelska, A., Chartier, C. R., Kekecs, Z., Lynott, D., Jones, B., ... Parveen, N. (2018, November 1). Investigating object orientation effects across 14 languages. Provisionally accepted at Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

Moshontz, H., Campbell, L., Ebersole, C. R., IJzerman, H., Urry, H. L., Forscher, P. S., ... Chartier, C. R. (2018). The Psychological Science Accelerator: Advancing psychology through a distributed collaborative network. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 1 (4), 501-515.

Consulting

My experience in research as a psycholinguist and as an instructor in research methods and statistics means that I have extensive experience cleaning, analysing, and presenting data from behavioural experiments and studies.

In previous projects I have handled eye-tracking, language learning, and questionnaire data from projects associated with cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and clinical psychology.

I have extensive experience in using the R programming language, Python, and Julia.

I have particular strength in data analysis in the following areas, amongst others:

Mixed effects modelling
Bayesian modelling and inference
Regression (linear and generalised)
Machine learning (classification and clustering)
ANOVA methods, including MANOVA and ANCOVA

Some past projects can be found on GitHub.

You can contact me about statistical and methodological consulting via email here

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