Staff Directory

PhD students

Approximately 20 students are currently studying for a PhD in the Department. We are presently putting a PhD programme in place which aims to equip PhD students with a wide range of skills to improve their chances on the job market.

Besides dedicated modules in Research Methods and Academic Writing, research students can participate in a wide range of workshops and research seminars organised by the Department, and by the University more widely, to enhance their general research skills.

Departmental research is clustered within different research groups, each with their own area of interest: Developmental, Disability and Society, Language Processing, Sign Language and Deaf Studies, and Speech, Hearing and Voice. Each PhD student belongs to one or more of these groups. Furthermore, students are able to use our well-equipped laboratories: the Phonetics Lab specializes in the analysis of speech production of both typical and atypical speakers and the acoustic analysis of speech, particularly - but not exclusively - within the area of speech forensics or the 'acoustics of crime'. The Audiology Lab offers opportunities for speech perception research, while the Sign Language and Gesture Lab offers facilities for research into the use of sign language and gesture in deaf and hearing populations.

Please follow the links below to read about our PhD students' research:

Anna Caute / Andrea Dohmen / Celia Harding / Natalie Hasson / Hannah Hockey / Mariam Khater / Abigail Levin / Anne Mayne / Sarah Northcott / Marilyn Panayi / Kamila Polisenska / Ashwag Wallan / Anne Zimmer-Stahl

Anna Caute - Aphasia   

Anna's PhD project is called Enhancing communication in aphasia through gesture, and is investigating the use of gesture therapy for people with severe aphasia.  Her supervisors are Jane Marshall and Naomi Cocks. The project is a group therapy study and is examining whether people with severe aphasia are able to learn a set of gestures and whether they are able to use these to convey a message or a narrative to their communication partner. There are two phases of therapy: the first is split between gesture and naming therapy and is carried out just with the person with aphasia. The second phase involves a conversation partner.

Anna trained as a speech and language therapist at City University, completing the PGDip course in 2003. She then worked for Waltham Forest Primary Care Trust in a variety of paediatric and adult settings and developed a particular interest in aphasia therapy. In 2006 she carried out an MSc project investigating the use of telephone and postal surveys to measure quality of life after stroke, supervised by Katerina Hilari, Tim Pring and Sarah Northcott.

Conference presentations

Andrea Dohmen - Child Language   

Andrea's thesis title is Investigating non-linguistic and linguistic copying skills
in children with typical and delayed language development, and she is supervised by Shula Chiat and Penny Roy, and Christina Kauschke (Philipps-University Marburg). The relationship between different types of copying and language has been examined in depth in typically developing children and children with autism, whereas the relation between different types of copying and specific deficits in language has been less extensively explored. The main aim of Andrea's study is to investigate whether, and to what extent, performance on a range of novel non-linguistic and linguistic copying-tasks differ between groups of young typically developing and language delayed children. The study further seeks to explore whether any relations between these early copying skills and profiles of early language deficits can be observed within the clinical groups.

Publications
Conference Presentations

Celia Harding - Neonatal Development   

Celia's PhD research investigates Early feeding and comunication, and is supervised by Nicola Botting. 

Natalie Hasson - Child Language   

Natalie's PhD project is Dynamic assessment and informed intervention for children with language impairments, and is being supervised by Nicola Botting and Barbara Dodd. 

Hannah Hockey - Child Language 

Hannah's project is investigating The skills required for repeating real words and made-up words, and how these skills differ in young children with and without language difficulties. She is going to follow up the children in her sample after 18 months and thereby hopes to identify which factors make the task predictive of later language difficulties. Hannah works as a speech and language therapist and is doing her project part-time. Her project supervisors are Penny Roy and Shula Chiat, and she also receives lots of support and inspiration for her project from her speech and language therapy team.

Before training to be a speech and language therapist, Hannah studied for a degree in Psychology and French, which led her to become interested in psycholinguists and cognitive neuropsychology. Her final year project investigated 'theory of mind' and the ability of people with Alzheimer's Disease to recognise emotion.

Mariam Khater - Child Language   

Mariam's research project investigates Early phonological skills as a predictor for receptive and expressive vocabulary size in Gulf Arabic Speaking children, and is supervised by Chloe Marshall and Shula Chiat. Mariam has a BSc in Speech-Language Pathology and a BSc in Audiology, both from the Appied Science University in Amman, Jordan, and an MA in Speech-Language Pathology from the University of Jordan. She has been working since 2003 as a clinical supervisor for the speech therapy department at the Hamada Medical Corporation, Doha, in Qatar.

Abigail Levin - Child Language   

Abigail's PhD investigates Speech and language therapy interventions with children from a psycholinguistic perspective.  The project is being supervised by Tim Pring and Shula Chiat. 

Anne Mayne (nee Gosling) - Child Language   

Anne is a part-time PhD student. The rest of the time she works as a specialist speech and language therapist with the North Thames Regional Cleft Lip and Palate Service, based between the St Andrew's Centre, Broomfield Hospital, Chelmsford and Great Ormond Street Hospital, London. The title of Anne's PhD is Narrative, discourse and affective language processing in secondary school aged children with 22q11 deletion syndrome. Her supervisors are Penny Roy and Dermot Bowler (Dept of Psychology).

22q11 deletion syndrome (22q11DS) is usually associated with mild to moderate learning difficulties and significant communication skills impairment, with particular deficits in social communication skills. This study will provide an in-depth analysis of the narrative skills of a cross section of individuals aged 11 - 16 years with 22q11DS, compared to children with autistic spectrum disorder and normally developing, language matched, peers. The study will test the hypotheses that there will be differences between the performance of the three groups on the narrative tasks, with particular reference to the language of emotion and thought and that there will be an associations between performance of subjects on narrative tasks and on measures of language and emotional understanding.

Publications
Conference Presentations

Sarah Northcott - Aphasia   

Sarah's PhD research is titled The role of social support after a stroke and is supervised by Katerina Hilari, Jane Marshall and Jane Ritchie (external adviser). The aim of this research is to explore how patterns of social support change following a stroke, and to see which types and sources of support may be vulnerable. It will examine the role of social support in adjusting to life after a stroke, and analyse how support needs may change over time. It will also look at which patterns of social support are associated with better outcomes (psychological and functional). Finally, it will compare the support needs and experiences of those with and without aphasia. The study is a repeated-measures cohort study of people admitted to two NHS hospitals with stroke within a 15 month period, with questionnaires administered face to face at 2 weeks, 3 months, and 6 months post stroke. 87 participants were recruited, with 82% follow up rate to 6 months. In-depth qualitative interviews were also carried out with 29 participants, exploring why changes were occurring and how this was being perceived.

Publications
Conference presentations

Marilyn Panayi - (Gesture)   

Marilyn is a Life Sciences Zoology graduate from Liverpool University, where she specialised in developmental biology. She began her academic research career at University College London in the Department of Anatomy & Embryology. Since then she has held posts in the UK, USA and worked on various EU research projects. Marilyn is currently completing her PhD studies, with a thesis entitled: 'Spatial Cognition in Action: SCA Towards a model of dynamic neuro-atypical and neuro-typical child embodied gesture' submitted (2010). Her research and pedagogy focuses on: modelling of neuro-atypical and neuro-typical children's spatial cognition (gesture); enhancing children's dynamic interaction; development of future interactive technologies.

Selected Publications
Selected conference presentations

Kamila Polisenska - Child Language   

Kamila's PhD thesis is titled An investigation of relations between children's language and memory, and is supervised by Shula Chiat and Penny Roy. Kamila's main research interest is first language acquisition. She particularly interested in the relation between memory and language development. Although this relationship is widely recognized, its nature is little understood. Measures of short-term memory such as word, non-word and sentence repetition have demonstrated high levels of sensitivity in differentiating children with language impairment from their typically developing peers. Given the sensitivity of repetition tasks it is desirable to know how much they depend on memory and how much on language knowledge. The aim of Kamila's project is to establish how linguistic (i.e., lexical, prosodic, semantic, and syntactic) factors influence memory span. She will investigate the memory-language relation by looking at young children's repetition of sentences and pseudosentences that are systematically varied in linguistic and memory demands.

Conference presentations

Ashwag Wallan - Child Language   

Ashwag's thesis title is An investigation of sentence repetition as a measure of linguistic processing in both typically developing and language impaired Saudi children, and this work is being supervised by Shula Chiat and Penny Roy. The study aims to investigate the possibility of using sentence repetition as an assessment tool for Arabic language development by comparing the levels and patterns of performance of typically developing children and children with language impairment on a novel Arabic sentence repetition task. A further purpose is to investigate the underlying processes involved in the sentence repetition task by comparing the performance of participants on three conditions of sentence repetition (typical sentences, semantically anomalous sentences, syntactically anomalous sentences) and on a phonological short-term memory test involving digit span, word serial recall and nonword serial recall.

Anne Zimmer-Stahl - Aphasia   

Anne's dissertation concerns Intonation in aphasia: An autosegmental-metrical approach. Her supervisors are Rachael-Anne Knight and Naomi Cocks. Anne is analysing intonation in nonfluent aphasic speech with respect to which disturbances can be explained by primarily intonational impairments and which are due to secondary effects resulting from other areas of linguistic breakdown. Issues under consideration include the relationships between competence and performance, syntax and prosody, phonetics and phonology. Of special interest will be the question of where timing comes into play in terms of processing as well as in terms of representational categories (as in tonal alignment).