Dr Helen Spicer-Cain

Overview

Helen is a lecturer in LCS and also works part-time as an independent speech and language therapist. She mostly works with preschool and early school-age autistic children, but also has interests in other speech, language and communication needs and has worked in mainstream and specialist schools during her career.

Helen is also the Programme Director for the cross-school Introduction to Health Sciences foundation programme and enjoys supporting students to reach their BSc programmes of choice in Speech and Language Therapy, Radiography, Nursing and other professions.

Helen completed her PhD thesis at City, University of London in May 2019. Her research followed a cohort of children with older siblings who have SLCN, comparing their communication skills in infancy with those of control children. A subset of the children were seen for longitudinal follow-up at the age of 2-3 to investigate predictors of children's communication skills at preschool age. Particularly, this analysis focused on the predictive value of novel dynamic assessment measures taken in infancy. Helen is currently following up this work with a grant from the Heather van der Lely Foundation, and is preparing to visit the children at age 6 and assess their language, social communication and phonological awareness skills.

Qualifications

• PhD, City, University of London, United Kingdom, Oct 2012 – May 2019
• MSc Neuroscience, Language and Communication, UCL, UK, Sep 2009
• BSc Speech Sciences, UCL, UK, Aug 2008

Employment

• Research Fellow, City, University of London, Feb 2019 – Aug 2021
• Lecturer, City, University of London, Jun 2018 – present

2^nd supervisor

• Anna Harvey, Research Student

Publications by category