Engage with Developmental Language Disorder
In collaboration with
About us
E-DLD was co-founded by three academics: Dr Michelle St Clair, Professor Jenny Gibson and Professor Nicola Botting. We have been researching language difficulties for many years. Each of us has faced stumbling blocks when carrying out research into DLD.
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Low public awareness of DLD makes it hard to invite people to take part in research.
Fewer studies into DLD means lower understanding by families and professionals.
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We wanted to change this. So we created E-DLD: Informing and empowering families while improving research.
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Meet the
Core E-DLD team
Dr Michelle St-Clair - E-DLD Director
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Michelle is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bath. Her research focuses on the long-term outcomes associated with DLD. She is interested in how early language delay and disorder influences long term child and adolescent outcomes. Her research focuses primarily on emotional and social difficulties among young people with DLD.
Professor Nicola Botting
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Nikki is a Professor at City, University of London. Her research focuses on language impairment, autism, and other developmental disorders. She is particularly keen to know more about the overlap between different disorders and the links between verbal and non-verbal skills.
Professor Suze Leitão
Suze works as a Professor of Speech Pathology and the Director of Graduate Research in the Curtin School of Allied Health in Western Australia. She is particularly interested in developing and evaluating therapy approaches that can be used in by clinicians and families in a range of settings. She grew up in Europe, trained and lived in the UK, and currently lives in Fremantle, Western Australia.
Professor Jenny Gibson
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Jenny is a Professor at the University of Cambridge. Her research explores the links between language and social development. She is particularly interested in the impact of autism and DLD on mental health and social relationships during childhood.
Meet the E-DLD
ECR Research Associates
Kyleigh Melville
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Kyleigh Melville (she/her) is an ESRC-funded PhD Candidate in Psychology and Education at The University of Edinburgh. Her research explores school staff and neurodivergent students’ experiences with multi-sensory environments using community-informed and participatory approaches. Prior to her PhD, Kyleigh worked as a Special Education Needs (SEND) educator in England for the past 8 years in public and private education as well as the third sector, specialising in working with autistic children and young people with co-occurring ADHD, dyslexia, socio-emotional mental health needs, profound and multiple learning disabilities, speech and language needs, and Down Syndrome. Her experience of teaching neurodivergent students, and her lived experience as a relative and friend to neurodivergent individuals motivates her passion in conducting research with and for neurodivergent communities
Dr. Soon Tat Lee
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Dr. Soon Tat Lee is a speech-language therapist and researcher focused on how we learn and use language, with a special interest in child language development. After five years helping clients in a public hospital, he earned his PhD in Psychology. Now an Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, he explores how bilinguals, particularly children, learn and process the languages they speak. He is passionate about creating new ways to test language skills for bilingual children and adults who speak understudied language pairs like Malay-English and Mandarin-English.​​
Dr. Jane Lai
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Dr. Jane Lai is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant and Sessional Teaching Academic at Macquarie University, Australia, and an affiliated Postdoctoral Fellow at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on child language acquisition and disorders, particularly DLD and multilingualism. She is specifically interested in developing culturally appropriate assessment tools that accurately identify DLD among multilingual children from diverse linguistic backgrounds.
Supporting team
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The E-DLD project is currently supported by Iris Edwards and Adrian Ng (Placement student, University of Bath).
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E-DLD has also been supported by Ellie Barker, Jason Chan, Jasmine Horsham, Vyara Stoyanova, Dhun Hemal Mehta (Placement students, University of Bath), Tsz Lok Ng, Sidrah Shaheen (Placement students, University of Cardiff), Alexia Avraam (Intership student, Utrecht University), Sophie Pharo, Sunny Park, Annabelle Cameron (Undergraduate students, University of Bath), and Dr Vanessa Lloyd-Esenkaya and Dr Annabel Burnley (former PhD students, University of Bath).
Contact us
E-DLD team
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Department of Psychology, University of Bath,
Claverton Down, Bath,
BA2 7AY
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