Dr Cecilia Zuniga-Montanez

BA, MSc, PhD

School of Education

Research Associate

c.zuniga-montanez@sheffield.ac.uk

The Wave

Full contact details

Dr Cecilia Zuniga-Montanez
School of Education
The Wave
2 Whitham Road
Sheffield
S10 2AH

Profile

I am a Research Associate working on the ICICLES project which explores the impact of Covid-19 on children's language, educational and socioemotional skills.

I have previously worked on different projects investigating language development in childhood at the University of Leeds and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

I completed my PhD at the University of Birmingham, where I investigated how typically developing infants, late talkers and children born preterm learn words and the word learning biases they use. My research also included two vocabulary interventions, one for typically developing infants and one for late talkers, aimed at boosting vocabulary learning.

Research interests: My areas of interest include infant and child language and cognitive development, language delays and vocabulary interventions.

Publications

Journal articles

Davies C, Ebbels S, Nicoll H, Syrett K, White S & Zuniga‐Montanez C (2023) Supporting adjective learning by children with Developmental Language Disorder: Enhancing metalinguistic approaches. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 58(2), 629-650.
Davies C, Syrett K, Taylor L, Wilkes S & Zuniga‐Montanez C (2022) Supporting adjective learning across the curriculum by 5–7 year‐olds: Insights from psychological research. Language and Linguistics Compass, 16(11).
Zuniga-Montanez C, Kita S, Aussems S & Krott A (2021) Beyond the Shape of Things: Infants Can Be Taught to Generalize Nouns by Objects’ Functions. Psychological Science, 32(7), 1073-1085.
Zuniga-Montanez C & Krott A () Late Talkers can generalise trained labels by object shape similarities, but not unfamiliar labels. Journal of Child Language, 1-24.

Preprints

Zuniga-Montanez C, Lisauskaite E, Hutchinson J, Fricke S & Bowyer-Crane C (2024) Risk and Protective Factors Affecting Children's Socioemotional Skills in the First Year Post-Pandemic, Center for Open Science.
Zuniga-Montanez C, Fricke S, Lisauskaite E, Hutchinson J & Bowyer-Crane C (2023) ‘Making sure that people are in a good place is draining, and nobody does that for me’: The pandemic and its ongoing impact on teachers and headteachers, Center for Open Science.

Research group: Member of the Education and Psychology research cluster.