Prior to moving to Cambridge in January 2003, Usha Goswami was Professor of Cognitive Developmental Psychology at the Institute of Child Health, University College London. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in 1987, her topic was reading and spelling by analogy. Her research has covered the relations between phonology and reading, with special reference to rhyme, rhythm and analogy in reading acquisition, and rhyme and rhythm processing in dyslexic and deaf children’s reading. A major focus of the research is cross-linguistic with projects including cross-language studies of the impact of deficits in auditory temporal processing on reading development and developmental dyslexia, neuroimaging studies of the neural networks underpinning reading in good and poor deaf adult readers, studies of reading development and its precursors in deaf children with cochlear implants, and a set of projects based around lexical and acoustic statistics, investigating the impact of ‘neighbourhood relations’ (similarity relations such as rhyme) in phonological and orthographic processing in different languages, and the impact of the amplitude modulation structure of the speech signal on phonological and morphological development.