Dr Glenn Williams

Assistant Professor

Department: Psychology

I graduated from Northumbria University in 2011 and 2012, obtaining my BSc (Hons) Psychology and MRes Language & Cognition degrees respectively. In 2016 I graduated with a PhD in Psychology at the University of Dundee under the supervision of Dr. Yuki Kamide.

Following this, I worked as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow on a Leverhulme funded grant with Prof Vera Kempe at Abertay University exploring the impact of dialect on literacy acquisition. I was then appointed as Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sunderland in 2019 before I returned to Northumbria University as Assistant Professor in Psychology in 2022.

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Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

My research interests are centred on language processing and literacy acquisition. I'm exploring how we represent (spatial) events as discourse unfolds, and how this influences the accessibility of discourse referents during processing. I'm also interested in how exposure to a dialect influences literacy acquisition, language comprehension, and production.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Control processes of cross- and within-language interference-A replication of Liu et al. (2019)., Williams, G., Kirk, N., Sánchez, L., Afshar, Z., Wen, Y., Declerck, M. 7 Apr 2025, In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition
Assessing the psychobiological demands of high-fidelity training in pre-hospital emergency medicine, Wetherell, M., Williams, G., Doran, J. 9 Oct 2024, In: Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine
Time spent playing video games during periods of isolation has no effect on loneliness or mental health, Hodgetts, S., Butler, J., Williams, G. 2 Oct 2024, In: Behaviour and Information Technology
Uncovering the social determinants of brain injury rehabilitation, Dunne, S., Williams, G., Bradbury, C., Keyes, T., Lane, A., Yang, K., Ellison, A. 1 Sep 2023, In: Journal of Health Psychology
Adverse effects of loneliness but no effect of gaming on mental health in gamers during three UK COVID-19 lockdowns, Hodgetts, S., Williams, G., Butler, J. 18 Feb 2022
Exposure to dialect variation in an artificial language prior to literacy training impairs reading of words with competing variants but does not affect decoding skills, Williams, G., Panayotov, N., Kempe, V. 1 Dec 2022, In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
Uncovering the social determinants of brain injury rehabilitation, Dunne, S., Williams, G., Bradbury, C., Keyes, T., Lane, A., Yang, K., Ellison, A. 25 Jul 2022
How does dialect exposure affect learning to read and spell? An artificial orthography study, Williams, G., Panayotov, N., Kempe, V. 1 Dec 2020, In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Implicit Sequence Learning in Applied Game Design, Panayotov, N., Williams, G., Kirk, N., Kempe, V. 7 Jan 2020
Spatial narrative context modulates semantic (but not visual) competition during discourse processing, Williams, G., Kukona, A., Kamide, Y. 1 Oct 2019, In: Journal of Memory and Language