I am Professor of Cognition in the Department of Psychology at Lancaster University. I have a BSc (Mancun) in Philosophy and Maths, an MSc and a PhD (Edinburgh) in Cognitive Science. I have previously held posts at Edinburgh University, University of Warwick, University of York, and the University of Amsterdam. My work sits at the intersection of Psychology and Linguistics, and I use methods including behavioural and observational studies and computational modelling to investigate language and cognition.

My name is pronounced "pad+rick mon-uh-hun" (unless you're Irish and you know better).

Language acquisition, literacy, and language evolution

I am interested in children's early environment supports their language development. In particular, how phonology, prosody, gesture, distribution of words, and wider environmental information sources are combined by the child as she/he constructs knowledge of words and grammar.

I am also interested in how early language development influences literacy development, and how children's oral language skills relate to the effectiveness of different types of reading training.

I am also interested in the properties of languages that assist in learning - because languages change quickly, there is lots of scope for dialects that are easier to learn to be selected over dialects that are harder to learn. I plot the extent to which these learnability properties are embedded within the world's languages and can be tracked through diachronic studies of language change.