Jo has been awarded the Neil O’Connor Award by the Developmental Section of the British Psychological Society for her paper “Does phonetic repertoire in minimally verbal autistic preschoolers predict the severity of later expressive language impairment?”.  This prize is awarded annually for an excellent piece of published research on cognitive disorders that appear in development and persist throughout life.

We are delighted to welcome Izzy Metcalfe to the Welling and Language Lab! Izzy will be working as a Research Assistant with Sarah on her Prudence Trust fellowship project. She will be working on identifying ways of adapting CBT delivery for young people with language disorder and developing a task to measure CBT comprehension.

Courtenay, Sarah and co-authors have written a paper called “Developmental language disorder: a hidden condition”. In this paper we call for better services and research that address both language and mental health needs of young people with language disorder. The article included an illustration by the brilliant Siouxsie – you can find more of her incredible work on Insta: mydldlife. 

Read more: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2024/feb/mental-health-needs-young-people-language-disorder-are-being-neglected 

Sarah is spending a month visiting Dr Erik Nook at the University of Princeton. She will be collaborating with Erik to look at linguistic complexity in adolescent therapy conversations as part of her Prudence Trust Fellowship.