Communication mechanisms in British Sign Language (BSL)

British Sign Language (BSL) is reportedly used by approx. 150K people in the UK, yet its psycholinguistic aspects of the language as a communicative medium are relatively under-investigated. We invite applications from strong and motivated candidates to our highly interdisciplinary PhD project on acquisition and processing mechanisms of BSL. A variety of specific issues can be addressed in this investigation, for example, bilingualism in BSL and English in children and adults; interplay of different types of signals; ‘dialects’ in BSL; identity and BSL. We believe that it is crucial to address this issue with multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches.

We envisage students would have a background in Psychology or a relevant subject (e.g., Speech & Language Therapy, Linguistics, Psycholinguistics). We would particularly welcome applications from BSL users or from those with a good working knowledge of BSL. The specialisation in the PhD would be in Psychology (PhD in Psychology). Students without a sufficient Psychology background may be offered to undertake one of our MSc programmes, or some of our MSc training modules, in their 1st year.