Research Home

LCS makes a very significant contribution to research and scholarship within the Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) profession. You can find out more about our research on these pages.

LCS makes a very significant contribution to research and scholarship within the Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) profession, with an average of about 50 publications per year.  Much of our research has a strong clinical focus and is conducted in collaboration with practising colleagues. 


In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), 60% of our submissions were judged to be of international significance, with 40% of those being in the top two research categories of international excellence and world-leading. LCS was the only SLT department in the UK that entered a ‘stand alone’ submission. All other departments running SLT courses combined with larger, more research active centres. Despite this, the RAE results show that LCS is not only the largest provider of speech and language therapy courses in the UK, it also produces an equivalent level of top quality research when compared to established centres for wider disciplines such as psychology and allied health. This combination ensures that our staff, students and visitors experience a truly excellent working environment. 


Dr Nicola Botting and Dr Katerina Hilari are the LCS research directors. 

 

 

Research groups  /  Current and recent research grants  /  Research fellows  /  Research students  /  Research MSc degrees

 

Research groups   

The Department has five research groupings. Further details of the these groupings can be found by exploring the links below:

 

Developmental Research Group

Disability and Society Research Group

Language Processing Research Group

Sign Language and Deaf Studies Research Group

Speech, Hearing and Voice Research Group

 

Current and recent research grants   

Current and recent research grants made to members of LCS include: 

 

Research fellows   

We have a number of post-doctoral research fellows who have been successful in securing funding from highly competitive sources. Current research fellows are:

  • Dr Chloe Marshall. Chloe has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship  to study sign language and working memory in deaf children. More information about Chloe’s research can be found here.
  • Dr Wolfgang Mann. Wolfgang has been awarded a City University London Research Fellowship to study the development of a web-based British Sign Language Vocabulary Test. More information about Wolfgang's research can be found here.
  • Dr David Willams. David has been awarded a City University London Research Fellowship to study the use of inner speech in children with autism. More information about David's research can be found here. 
     

Research students   

The department has a healthy number of PhD research students.  Examples of current and recently completed PhDs include (with source of funding):

  • Event processing skills in people with aphasia (Connect)
  • Therapy for word finding in people with aphasia bilingual in Bengali and English (The Barts & the London NHS Trust)
  • Dynamic assessment of children’s language (LCS)
  • SLT interventions with children from a psycholinguistic perspective (LCS)
  • Social support after stroke in people with and without aphasia (HEFCE)
  • Enhancing communication in aphasia through gesture (The Stroke Association)
  • Perceptions of SLT in the Tamil speaking community (Consortium for Healthcare Research of the Health Foundation).
  • Optimal feeding techniques for pre-term infants (The Barts & the London NHS Trust).
  • Early feeding and communication (LCS)
  • Semantic and syntactic awareness in reading development (HEFCE)
  • Usher’s syndrome (HEFCE—joint with the Department of Optometry)
  • Phonology in Down Syndrome (Jérôme Lejeune Foundation)
  • Linguistic and non-linguistic copying skills in children with typical and delayed language development (City University)
  • Early repetition skills and later language development
  • Narrative skills of 11 – 16 year old individuals with 22q11 deletion syndrome (joint with the Department of Psychology)
  • Relations between children’s language and memory (LCS)
  • Intonation in aphasia (HEFCE)
  • Lexical access in jargon aphasia
  • Rhotic production and perception in children (HEFCE)
  • Early phonological skills as a predictor for vocabulary size in Gulf Arabic speaking children
  • Phonological awareness in Saudi children (University of Riyadh)
  • Sentence repetition in Arabic speaking children (University of Riyadh)

Further information for PhD research students can be found in the School of Community and Health Sciences Research Degrees webpage.

 

Research MSc degrees   

The department offers MSc courses attended by qualified SLTs (MSc in Human Communication; MSc in Joint Professional Practice) or other professionals (MSc in Joint Professional Practice). Click here for more information about these courses. Examples of MSc projects can be found here.


All MSc courses in LCS include a research project. Most projects entail clinical research, often conducted in the student’s own setting. In this way they further strengthen links between the department and working clinicians. A number of these have been published.

 

  

 

The City University research pages can be accessed here:

City University Research Information