Engage with Developmental Language Disorder
In collaboration with
Current E-DLD Research
Below, you will find a selection of ongoing research projects available for participation. Sign up and get involved!​
1
SoUNDS - Screening of Undiagnosed DLD in students
The Engage with DLD team is thrilled to announce that we have received a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council for about £876,000 to validate our Screening Tool for Adults with Non-Diagnosed DLD (STAND).
This screening tool initially came about after a potential adult E-DLD member emailed to say they thought they had DLD, but they didn’t have an official diagnosis. We will now conduct three years of study to both validate and confirm the screening tool does indeed identify DLD. We will then look at identify the rates of undiagnosed DLD in adult students, both at universities and at FE colleges. We will then look at the needs of students with DLD and how they needs can be met by their disability services. We will then create guidance toolkits to help support both adults with DLD as well guidance documents to help disability services best support students with DLD.
We hope this project will be the first step towards rolling this screening tool out in different context. Ideas for future research include employment context, sixth form, and forensic settings.
2
Parents of children with DLD survey project
We will soon be collecting data using the Prolific platform to create a comparison sample for our growing E-DLD databases.
We will be collecting data from 100 parents of children in each of these age brackets: 3-4, 5-7, 8-10, 11-13 and 14-15 years old.
As much as possible, we will try to recruit parents of children without any language difficulties.
We will collect the same data that we collect from E-DLD parents at sign up as well as the matching yearly survey measurements.
3
Adult experiences of accessing healthcare​
Our incoming Health Psychology placement student, Dhun Mehta, will be conducing her MSc Health Psychology dissertation on our new questionnaire aimed to measure experiences of adults with DLD in talking with GPs (doctors) or nurses, within a primary healthcare setting.
Anecdotally, we often hear of difficulties accessing healthcare in adults with DLD, but this will be first study to investigate whether adults with DLD do indeed have more issues engaging with primary healthcare professionals.
Dhun will look to validate this questionnaire and establish any group differences from our adults with DLD and our comparison sample of adults without DLD.
4
How does the experience of adults with DLD within mental health therapy differ to adults without DLD?
Rachael Atkinson will be working with Dr Michelle St Clair on her dissertation for her MSc in Applied Clinical Psychology.
Rachael will be looking at the reported experiences of adult within our free text question after our short questionnaire about engagement and experiences accessing mental healthcare, or counselling/therapy.
Rachael will look at the qualitative experiences and see if the experiences of adults with DLD differ in any substantial way from adults without DLD.
5
Screening tool and language assessments in HE students​
Amy Bennett is a University of Bath final year undergraduate student currently conducting her dissertation study. Her study. aims to conduct the initial validation of the Screening Tool for Adults with Non-Diagnosed DLD (STAND) on a sample of undergraduate students at the University of Bath by comparing individual scores on the STAND tool to scores on two pre-existing, validated measures of language ability. These are, the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals (CELF-5) (Coret & McCrimmon, 2015) and the Communication Checklist – Self Report (CC- SR) (Bishop et al., 2009). The results will demonstrate how well the STAND tool can predict objective and self-reported language ability. The influence of bilingualism with also be explored to help determine whether the STAND tool is suitable for identifying undiagnosed DLD in both monolingual and bilingual adults.
6
Face validity of our screening tool
Ellie Barker is a University of Bath final year undergraduate student currently conducting her dissertation study. Her project looking at assessing the face validity of the Screening Tool for Adults with Non-diagnosed DLD (STAND). Adults with DLD were interviewed and asked their thoughts on the content and wording of the current questions, giving feedback on clarity and accessibility of the tool. They were also asked if there were any key experiences as a person with DLD that were missing. From this a thematic analysis is being conducted to look for common themes in participants’ responses. This feedback will be used to modify the STAND to make it clearer and more accessible to people with DLD.