Dr Ruth Corps
School of Psychology
Early Career Research Fellow
Full contact details
School of Psychology
Interdisciplinary Centre of the Social Sciences (ICOSS)
219 Portobello
Sheffield
S1 4DP
- Profile
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I am an Early Career Research Fellow in Psychology, specialising in the cognitive mechanisms supporting conversation and the broader impacts of conversational breakdown and difficulty. My work has predominantly focused on student populations, but I am increasingly interested in populations that struggle with communication (such as those with hearing loss or ADHD) and how these difficulties develop across the lifespan.
I completed both my MA (Hons) in Psychology and my MSc in Psychology of Language at the University of Dundee and my PhD in the Psychology of Language at the University of Edinburgh. My PhD investigated the predictive mechanisms that support rapid turn-taking during conversation, focusing on how predicting what another person is likely to say help us determine what we should say and when we should say it. After graduating, I stayed at Edinburgh for a further two years as a postdoctoral researcher, investigating how another person's perspective may help us predict what they are likely to say. I then spent four years at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, investigating the mechanisms supporting conversation in real-world interactions.
- Qualifications
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PhD Psychology of Language (University of Edinburgh)
MSc Psychology of Language (University of Dundee)
MA (Hons) Psychology (University of Dundee)
- Research interests
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I am interested in the cognitive mechanisms supporting language use during conversation, factors that result in difficulty with these mechanisms, and the social impact of these breakdowns. I use a variety of methods (e.g., behavioural paradigms, eye-tracking, conversation analysis) and statistical techniques (e.g., Bayesian analyses) to investigate these issues.
- Publications
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Journal articles
- Prediction in simultaneous interpreting: evidence for a two-stage account. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 41(7), 942-958. View this article in WRRO
- Reduced intelligibility explains delayed responses to questions in older adults with hearing loss. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 41(4), 548-559. View this article in WRRO
- Repetition leads to short-term reduction of word frequency and name agreement effects: evidence from a Dutch two-session picture naming experiment. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 79(4), 803-818. View this article in WRRO
- Effects of listening demand on turn-taking processes: Investigating turn-end prediction and verbal response planning. Acta Psychologica, 260. View this article in WRRO
- Multiple repetitions lead to the long-term elimination of the word frequency effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 52(3), 489-504. View this article in WRRO
- The influence of familiarisation and item repetition on the name agreement effect in picture naming. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 78(7), 1487-1499. View this article in WRRO
- The role of answer content and length when preparing answers to questions. Scientific Reports, 14(1). View this article in WRRO
- Response planning during question-answering: does deciding what to say involve deciding how to say it?. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 31(2), 839-848. View this article in WRRO
- Evidence against egocentric prediction during language comprehension. Royal Society Open Science, 10(12). View this article in WRRO
- Evidence for two stages of prediction in non-native speakers: A visual-world eye-tracking study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 26(1), 231-243.
- Overrated gaps: Inter-speaker gaps provide limited information about the timing of turns in conversation. Cognition, 223. View this article in WRRO
- Prediction involves two stages: Evidence from visual-world eye-tracking. Journal of Memory and Language, 122. View this article in WRRO
- Prediction in simultaneous interpreting: evidence for a two-stage account. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 41(7), 942-958. View this article in WRRO
- Research group
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Cognitive and neural processes across the lifespan
- Grants
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University of Sheffield Higher Education Innovation Fund (2026-27). Converging perspectives: Aligning cognitive mechanisms with the lived experiences of conversational difficulty in ADHD (PI; £10,750)
Experimental Psychology Society small grant (approx. £10,000)
ESRC PhD studentship (approx. £54,000)
- Professional activities and memberships
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Early Career Research Representative (School of Psychology)
Deputy chair of the School of Psychology's ethics committee