Postdoctoral Research Associate/Research Assistant - Grade 6/7 (Depending on Experience and Qualifications)

Postdoctoral Research Associate/Research Assistant - Grade 6/7 (Depending on Experience and Qualifications)

2026-08-17

Postdoctoral Research Associate/Research Assistant - Grade 6/7(Depending on Experience and Qualifications)

University of Liverpool - Faculty of Health and Life Sciences -Institute of Population Health - Department of Psychology

Location:Liverpool

Hours:Full Time

Contract Type:Fixed-Term/Contract

Placed On:13th July 2026

Closes:31st August 2026

Job Ref:113173

We are looking to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Associate (or anexperienced Research Assistant) to join a new ESRC-funded project on earlylanguage acquisition, based in the Department of Psychology at the University ofLiverpool. This position focuses on the computational modelling side of theproject. You will work on extending an existing model of noun and verbacquisition (Brusini et al., 2021), originally developed for French, to otherlanguages. This will involve working with large-scale naturalistic languagecorpora (e.g. CHILDES) and adapting and refining the model to make it moregeneralisable and cognitively plausible.

The project aims to understand how children build grammatical categories(such as nouns and verbs) from early language input, and the computational workwill closely interact with parallel experimental work (EEG, eye-tracking,pupillometry) conducted within the same project.

What we are looking for; we are particularly interested in candidates with abackground in: computational linguistics / NLP cognitive science /psycholinguistics language acquisition or related fields Strong Python skillsare essential, and experience working with corpus data or computational modelsof language would be a major advantage.

You will work closely with an experimental postdoc, so an interest in linkingmodelling and empirical data is important. This post is fixed term for 2years.

This is a great opportunity for someone interested in combining computationalmodelling with questions about human language development in a collaborative,interdisciplinary environment.

If you are still awaiting your PhD to be awarded you will beappointed at Grade 6, spine point 30. Upon written confirmation that you havebeen awarded your PhD, your salary will be increased to Grade 7, spine point31.

Commitment to Diversity

The University of Liverpool is committed to enhancing workforce diversity. Weactively seek to attract, develop, and retain colleagues with diversebackgrounds and perspectives. We welcome applications from all genders/genderidentities, Black, Asian, or Minority Ethnic backgrounds, individuals livingwith a disability, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community.