Project topics

 

The 4th year projects fall into four broad areas in Language and Communication Science.  Some topics and supervisors cross over groups so look through them all to get a full picture of what is available.  Students interested in any of these projects should contact one of the research group conveners (Marshall, Joffe, Morgan or Cruice) as early as possible in the Summer term of the 3rd year.  Many projects can be done in groups.  Once projects and supervisors have been decided on - or if you are having problems finding something to do contact the 4th year project coordinator - Gary Morgan.

Click on a topic area to see projects and supervisors

 

 Speech and Language processing in children and adults - Convener Jane Marshall 

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 Developmental Language Disabilities - convener Victoria Joffe

         

  • Grammatical and lexical abilities in children with Williams syndrome - Victoria Joffe
  • Phonological Awareness and literacy - Victoria Joffe
  • Assessment of language impairment - Natalie Hasson
  • Phonetic assessment in children - Susanna Martin
  • Assessments and intervention of phonological disorder within a psycholinguistic framework - Victoria Joffe & Sarah Gourlay
  • Strategies to improve reading comprehension - Victoria Joffe
  • Facilitating language and communication in secondary school age children with language impairments - Victoria Joffe
  • Specific Language Impairment - Lucy Myers
  • Planning for talk - news telling within the national curriculum - Lucy Myers
  • Event processing in early years - Abigail Levin
  • Bootstrapping in action for intervention with sentences - Abigail Levin
  • Phonology and development - Sarah Barret-Jones
  • Narrative abilities of children and or adolescents with specific language impairment and/or learning disability. - Victoria Joffe
  • An investigation of the social communication abilities and social integration of adolescents/adults with learning difficulties or specific language impairment. - Victoria Joffe
  • Inferential understanding and language ability in specific language impairment.- Victoria Joffe
  • The use of context to aid in word recognition in language impaired children.- Victoria Joffe
  • Intervention with the language impaired and/or adolescent.- Victoria Joffe

  • Developing communication in the very early years. Ed Hooke - Early Years/Community Clinics Newham Primary Care Trust – Jane Marshall

  • Language and theory of mind - Gary Morgan
  • Bilingual children - Gary Morgan
  • Language in children with Spinal Muscular Atrophy - Gary Morgan & Bencie Woll

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 Deaf Studies - convener Gary Morgan

         

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 Communication Disability and Society - convener Madeline Cruice

        

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Kim Clarke Projects

I have large amounts of data from 3 separate audits

The first two lots of data collected relates to SLT input into critical care one in 2003 & one in 2004 - captured at a national level. I also have data on 2 snapshot audits of prevalence of patients with communication / swallowing disorders on this inpatient acute trust in 2004 & 2005. This has in house ethics clearance.

I would be very keen if someone wanted to crunch this data as their project from a statistical viewpoint - it would be excellent for the profession as well as we could use it to shape RCSLT policy (we are writing a position paper re service delivery to this group of patients for RCSLT at the moment).

I would be more than happy to help supervise a project or two relating to these topics - please get in touch with me as below if you have people interested.

Cheers

Email: Kim.Clarke@nwlh.nhs.uk

Ros Herman projects

We have recently published a narrative assessment in British Sign Language.  To complement the BSL data that has already been collected, I would like to collect some similar samples from hearing nursery and primary school children.  This would allow us to look at hearing children’s progress on this task (comparing children of different ages) and/or make comparisons with age-matched BSL users.  There are therefore two possible areas for projects:

a)      Collect narrative samples on groups of hearing children of different ages and compare their narrative development (suitable for a group of students)

b)      If students have BSL skills (Stage 2), there is the potential to compare data from one of the hearing groups in a) with a sample from the deaf BSL group

email: Ros Herman

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Allen Hirson projects

Effortful Speech

In an (as yet) unpublished case study, the following enigmatic finding motivates some further research.  A profoundly deaf adult speaker (no hearing aid) was shown to have extremely low speech intelligibility when evaluated by phonetically trained (and untrained) listeners scoring controlled target words in carrier test sentences. For this task, the scorers listened to the recording via headphones under laboratory conditions. 

The production task was also video recorded.  In a second task, listeners scored the target words on the basis of audio and video data.  Surprisingly, the intelligibility scored on the basis of audio-visual data was lower than that based on the audio data alone. It was hypothesized that the effortfulness of the deaf speech was providing misleading visual cues that lowered the already low intelligibility score - demonstrating a McGurk-like effect. 

It is proposed to replicate this study, with one or more other profoundly deaf subjects, and to describe more fully the effortful speech production.  (Anecdotally, deaf speakers are sometimes considered to be aggressive; could this be a function of their effortful speech?)  It is further proposed to test the McGurk-like hypothesis by using video dubbing/editing techniques to marry up the audio track of relatively unintelligible speech with the video track of effortful articulatory gestures, and normal articulatory gestures with the unintelligible speech.

  Projects done in this field are hard work, and will require energy and enthusiasm.

Allen Hirson

Speech Acoustics Lab

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