Literacy in the Digital Age: How Children Learn from Multimedia Written Language

About the Project

How children learn from reading and writing is rapidly changing in the digital age. Children now encounter written language through books, school materials, websites, social media, online videos, gaming environments, and multimodal digital platforms. While research has traditionally focused on printed books and conventional literacy experiences, much less is known about how these diverse digital text experiences influence children’s language, literacy, and knowledge development.

This PhD studentship forms part of a major Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award project investigating how children aged 11–14 build knowledge through multimedia written language. The wider programme introduces a new theoretical framework — Literacy as Input–Output Nexus (LION) — examining the reciprocal relationship between reading (text input) and writing (text output) during literacy development.

The project combines developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and computational methods to investigate how children’s reading experiences shape their writing, vocabulary, conceptual knowledge, and learning outcomes across the transition to secondary school.

The successful PhD candidate will contribute to several interconnected strands of research. These may include analysing large-scale corpora of children’s reading materials and written language, examining linguistic and conceptual features of digital and print texts, conducting behavioural studies of reading and writing development, and investigating how different forms of text exposure influence learning trajectories.

The student will receive training in a broad range of methods and techniques, including:

• developmental and educational research methods
• behavioural experiment design
• corpus linguistics and text analysis
• longitudinal data analysis
• natural language processing and computational approaches
• statistical modelling and reproducible research practices