Language

Example Projects

Assessment and treatment of reading and spelling difficulties in children and adolescents.

Dr Saskia Kohnen, Dr Trudy Krajenbrink, Dr Danielle Colenbrander (University of Bristol), Professor Lyndsey Nickels, Dr Nathan Caruana, Yumi Sheehan, Elena Babcock, Dr Erin Banales & Dr Teresa Schubert

Strands: Theory, Impairment & Treatment
AIM: To better understand reading and spelling development and dyslexia and dysgraphia in children and adolescents. This research includes large scale norming studies of reading and spelling tests with typically developing children and adolescents; an investigation of sound-letter knowledge in children; the development of new assessment material for high school students; single case studies of dyslexia and dysgraphia and their treatment.

COMPARE: Constraint Induced or Multi-Modal Aphasia Rehabilitation: An RCT of therapy for stroke related chronic aphasia.

Professor Lyndsey Nickels

Strands: Treatment
AIM: COMPARE is a national study which will determine if two intensive and contrasting treatments: multi-modal aphasia treatment (M-MAT) and constraint induced aphasia therapy (CIAT) result in better outcomes compared to the usual aphasia treatments (usual care: UC).

Conceptualisation deficits in aphasia.

Inga Hameister, Professor Lyndsey Nickels & Professor Roelien Bastiaanse (University of Groningen)

Strands: Theory & Impairment
Aim: Identifying the prevalence of conceptualisation deficits in aphasia and investigating to what extent language impairments in aphasia are underpinned by conceptualisation deficits.

Conversation therapy and quality of life.

Dr Scott Barnes and Professor Lyndsey Nickels

Strands: Treatment
Aim: How treatment of interaction with a conversation partner and a person with aphasia can improve quality of life.

Effects of gesture observation in action-verb naming.

Ana Murteira, Professor Lyndsey Nickels & Associate Professor Paul Sowman

Strands: Theory
Aim: To better understand the mechanisms underpinning the relationship between gesture and verb processing and how gestures can be used to facilitate verb retrieval in people with aphasia.

Enhancing Communicative Effectiveness and Satisfaction between People with Primary Progressive Aphasia and their Communication Partner

Cathy Taylor-Rubin, Professor Lyndsey Nickels & Dr Karen Croot

Strands: Treatment
The aim of the project is to demonstrate effective behavioral interventions for people with PPA and their partners in the areas of communication, well-being and support, through a series of single case design studies.

Improving word production without treatment

Ella Creet and Professor Lyndsey Nickels

Strands: Theory and Impairment
Aim: To understand what processes can improve spoken word production without treatment in people with aphasia.

Improving word retrieval in people with progressive aphasia

Professor Lyndsey Nickels, Dr Karen Croot & Cathy Taylor-Rubin

Strands: Treatment
Aim: To test and develop treatment to facilitate and help maintain communication in people with progressive aphasia.

Moved nouns in experiencer-verb sentences: Syntactic and semantic changes in sentence processing.

Margaret Ryan, Professor Lyndsey Nickels, Associate Professor Paul Sowman, Professor Linda Cupples (Linguistics Department)

Strands: Theory & Impairment
Aim: To discover the method and time-course by which the unimpaired brain processes the arguments of heard sentences containing experiencer-verbs in order to inform a new cognitive model of the sentence processing system, as well as to identify the steps in the process which are impaired in the asyntactic brain.

Neighbourhood density effects in spoken word production: picture naming in aphasia and/or bilingualism.

Dr Solène Hameau, Dr Britta Biedermann, Professor Lyndsey Nickels

Strands: Theory, Impairment and Treatment
Aim: To examine the influence of semantic and phonological neighbourhood density on naming performance in monolingual and bilingual individuals with and without aphasia, and on aphasia naming treatment.

The Influence of meaning on word production

Leonie Lampe, Dr Solène Hameau, Dr Nora Fielder and Professor Lydnsey Nickels

Strands: Theory and Impairment

Aim: To investigate the role that semantic neighbourhood plays a role in word production for both people with aphasia and unimpaired language production

Understanding factors affecting word retrieval.

Professor Lyndsey Nickels, Dr Nora Fieder, Dr Solène Hameau, Dr Britta Biedermann (Curtin University, WA) & Professor Wendy Best (University College London)

Strands: Theory & Impairment
Aim: To understand what factors affect how easy it is to retrieve a word and what kind of error people with aphasia or dementia make when they try to retrieve a word (e.g., cow-milk vs. cow-horse).

Understanding the peripheral stages of reading and spelling.

Professor Lyndsey Nickels, Dr Trudy Krajenbrink, Dr Teresa Schubert, Ana Murteira & Professor Brenda Rapp (Johns Hopkins University)

Strands: Theory
Aim: To better understand the peripheral stages of written word perception and production: i.e., the selection and production of the individual letters of a word.

Wellbeing in primary progressive aphasia

Leanne Ruggero, Professor Lyndsey Nickels & Dr Karen Croot

Aim: To better understand the perspectives of individuals with progressive aphasia on wellbeing and factors which promote living well with the condition.