Glenn Williams
Assistant Professor in Psychology
Northumbria University
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK
Northumbria University
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK
I'm a psycholinguist and Assistant Professor in Psychology at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. My research looks at how the language varieties we're exposed to shape the way we learn, understand and produce language.
Dialect is the main focus of my work. I research how growing up with more than one language variety affects learning to read and spell, and how dialect variation affects both comprehension and production. I also work on bilingualism, including how people manage interference within and across languages, and on how we keep track of events and the things being talked about as a story unfolds.
To answer these questions I use artificial language learning, eye-tracking, and large online behavioural experiments. I've also contributed to several big-team science projects, including multi-language studies with the Psychological Science Accelerator.
I'm an expert in R, multilevel modelling, and Bayesian inference, with additional experience in Python and Julia. I share the data and code behind my work openly, and I've written open textbooks on using R for psychological research. Alongside my language research, I collaborate on projects in areas such as health psychology, biopsychology, and mental wellbeing.
Before joining Northumbria in 2022, I was a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sunderland and a Leverhulme-funded postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Vera Kempe at Abertay University. I completed my PhD with Dr. Yuki Kamide at the University of Dundee, after a BSc (Hons) in Psychology and an MRes in Language & Cognition at Northumbria.
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 to study how language is processed as it unfolds, both in the lab and in public engagement activities.
Many of my studies run online through platforms such as Prolific, which makes it possible to recruit large and diverse samples. You can take part yourself by rating words for the Geordie Lexicon Database.
I specialise in multilevel and Bayesian modelling in R, and also work in Python and Julia. My open textbooks, R for Psychological Research and Data Science for Psychologists, teach these skills from the ground up.
You can find my most recent projects below. I'll regularly update this section by adding additional projects as they come along.
A psycholinguistic database of Tyneside English. Browse the lexicon, or help build it by rating Geordie words in the public norming study.
An open ebook and course in data science focusing on reproducible research practices using R. It's an updated version of my earlier book, R for Psychologists, which covers everything from processing raw data to running statistical tests and producing plots.
A tutorial series on calculating estimated marginal means and pairwise tests for mixed effects models from first principles, replicating R's emmeans package in R, Python, and Julia.
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.
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!
I offer statistical and methodological consulting for research projects involving behavioural data. Drawing on my own research and my teaching in research methods and statistics, I can help at any stage, from planning a study to analysing and reporting the results.
I've analysed eye-tracking, language learning, and questionnaire data in projects spanning cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and clinical and health psychology.
I work mainly in R, and also use Python and Julia. Areas where I can help include:
You can find examples of my analysis code on GitHub. To discuss a project, email me at glenn.williams@northumbria.ac.uk.
Download my CV (PDF).
For a full list of my publications, see my Google Scholar profile.
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