SCALES started as a dream over 14 years ago now. After several grant rejections, we finally got the funding we needed to screen the language skills over 7000 children in Surrey when they started school. We then followed the development of language, cognitive, social and academic progress for about 500 children from Year 1 to […]
One of the key findings from the first phase of SCALES was that children with language disorder also frequently have lower the an average non-verbal reasoning skills. This finding has been used to challenge the use of non-verbal ability cut-offs for diagnosis and for accessing speech and language services. In our new paper, recently published […]
Summer student Maria Jelen, detailing experiences from her first steps into the world of researching! This past summer, at a time of changing restrictions and global uncertainty, I was fortunate enough to have the fascinating opportunity to focus my attention on a completely different type of unpredictability – research. This is the story of my […]
Here in the LiLaC lab, we love to develop researchers of the future by providing opportunities for current UCL students to join the Lab, learn what it’s like to be part of a research team, and gain hands-on experience working with research data. This term, we have been joined (albeit virtually) by two wonderful second year undergraduate students, […]
SCALES researcher, Dr Sarah Griffiths, discusses the findings of her paper published recently in PeerJ titled: “Early language competence, but not general cognitive ability, predicts children’s recognition of emotion from facial and vocal cues”. Although most children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) do not develop mental health problems, they are at greater risk compared to […]
In March 2020, the UK entered lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Classroom-based schooling moved to remote-learning, and both children and teachers had to adapt to this new way of life. One of the primary research aims of the Surrey Communication and Language in Education Study (SCALES) is to investigate how language can support academic […]
In light of Mental Health Awareness Week 2020, PhD student Ria Bernard discusses links between stammering and mental health outcomes. When we talk about children who stammer, there is often an assumption that these children are ‘highly anxious’, ‘nervous’ individuals. Despite the fact that much work has been done to raise awareness about the causes […]
The SCALES team are pleased to present our Spring 2020 Newsletter. With school visits on hold due to the current climate, we explain how we are making plans to continue our project as soon as possible and discuss some of our new tasks for Year 8! Click the link below to view: Newsletter Spring 2020
Monday 3rd February marked the start of Children’s Mental Health Week and improving mental health outcomes for young people is a global priority. To coincide with Children’s Mental Health Week, we launched our new video “Words for Wellbeing – Why language is important for mental health” which presents some of the research findings from the […]
Lizzie Buchanan-Worster joined the LiLaC lab as an ESRC post-doctoral research fellow in October. In this blog she discusses her previous and current work on the relationship between lipreading and reading in deaf and hearing children. _______________________ Over the next year, I will be writing papers from my PhD and learning more from the SCALES […]