Careers in Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics

Professions: Speech Therapy

One possible career path lies in speech therapy. The University of Essex offers a 2-year MSc degree scheme in Speech and Language Therapy that leads to a professional qualification in speech therapy. The Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics schemes offered in our department provide important core training for this career path and increase the chances of entry to this or similar schemes elsewhere.

Professions: School Teacher

By taking one of the psycholinguistics schemes above you will have acquired expertise on language acquisition, language impairments and language processing, which should provide you with relevant background for entering a training course to become a language teacher, either in the UK or abroad; see this link for further information.

Careers in Research

Another career path lies in academic research in a university setting, following postgraduate work (generally a PhD). The psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics degrees are interdisciplinary and offer career prospects not only in linguistics departments, but also within the wider field of Cognitive Science. Furthermore, our research group has collaborative links to a number of international research centres from which postgraduate students benefit, and the best have the opportunity to co-author publications with our staff. Several of our recent psycholinguistics graduates have since taken up academic posts, e.g. at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and the Universities of Tuebingen, Hamburg, Kobe, Thessaloniki, and Portsmouth.

Other

Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics graduates who do not wish to pursue either of the above career paths may find that the combination of skills acquired as part of their degree scheme (including critically evaluating original research, experiment design, data collection and analysis, and linking theory to data) are also highly valued by a range of potential employers outside academia; see this link for further information.

For further information about careers in Modern Languages, English and Linguistics, see also the Departmental careers page.