I am interested in people's, especially learners', ability to understand and produce sentences and how these abilities are acquired in monolingual and bilingual children. I am also interested in how individual differences in children and adults affect language processing and performance.

More recently I have begun research examining sentence processing and language learning from syntactic priming in second language learners, tying in my personal interests and experiences as a language learner with my research interests.

After completing my PhD at the University of Edinburgh, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois and University of Edinburgh before moving to Warwick to take up a lectureship.

Representative publications:

Coumel, M., Ushioda, E., & Messenger, K. in press. Second language learning via syntactic priming: Investigating the role of modality, attention and motivation. Language Learning

Messenger, K. (Ed., 2022). Syntactic priming in language acquisition: Representations, mechanisms and applications. Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 31, John Benjamins.

Messenger, K. (2021). The persistence of priming: Exploring long-lasting syntactic priming effects in children and adults. Cognitive Science, 45: e13005.

Messenger, K., & Fisher, C. (2018). Mistakes weren't made: Three-year-olds' comprehension of novel-verb passives provides evidence for early abstract syntax. Cognition, 178, 118-132.

Branigan, H. P., & Messenger, K. (2016). Consistent and cumulative effects of syntactic experience in children's sentence production: Evidence for error-based implicit learning. Cognition, 157, 250-256.

Messenger, K., Branigan, H.P., McLean, J.F. & Sorace, A. (2012). Is young children's passive syntax semantically constrained? Evidence from syntactic priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 66(4), 568?587.