Research successes: July/August 2009
July/August 2009
General news
- Audiology and Deafness (A&D) were pleased to hear over the Summer that three articles from the research group were selected by The Hearing Journal to be included in their "best of 2008-2009" list. Publications included came from Kevin Munro, Wendy McCracken and the Paul Boyd. Well done. Audiologists in USA take this list very seriously!
- Congratulations to all those who competed for the annual Mabel Mansfield Cooper PG prize [an internal prize of £700 awarded to one PhD student with research interests relating to Hearing, Communication and Deafness (HCD)]. Alicja Malick, Emily Mayberry, Rachel Ellis and Anisa Visram all presented on their research interests as part of the competition. The standard of presentation was high. A special congratulations should go to Anisa whose presentation on "the speech benefits of using a hearing aid as well as a cochlear implant" saw her scoop the prize.
- Congratulations to Colette McKay for being awarded the Thomas Simm Littler Prize at the annual British Society of Audiology conference, for contributions to hearing research in the UK. Colette follows several other recipients from Manchester over the years, which seems appropriate as Thomas Simm Littler himself spent a large proportion of his career at Manchester, contributing to the advancement and development of the infant profession of clinical audiology.
Papers accepted
Clinical neuroscience and language disorders (CNLD) have had another successful period.
- Maya Soni, Anna Woollams and Matt Lambon Ralph have had a paper published in the Journal of Neurolinguistics; M. Soni, M.A. Lambon Ralph, K. Noonan, S. Ehsan, C. Hodgson, & A.M. Woollams 2009, ""L" is for tiger: Effects of phonological (mis)cueing on picture naming in semantic aphasia." Journal of Neurolinguistics, 22, 538-547. Congratulations. Further congratulations should go to Anna Woollams who also recently had her paper "Making Sense of Progressive Non-fluent Aphasia: An Analysis of Conversational Speech" accepted into 'Brain'.
- Matt Lambon Ralph's paper looking at the status of abstract vs concrete concepts in SD recently appeared in Neuropsychology. This is also the core paper in which the 96 synonym judgement test (which we use so much these days) makes its formal appearance (E. Jefferies, K. Patterson, R.W. Jones, & M.A. Lambon Ralph (2009). "Comprehension of concrete and abstract words in semantic dementia." Neuropsychology, 23, 492-49). Also, Matt's paper with Paul Conroy and Karen Sage ("Predicting the outcome of anomia therapy for people with aphasia post CVA: Both language and cognitive status are key predictors.") has been accepted into Neuropsychological Rehabilitation. Well done.
- Congratulations should also go to Patti Adank whose latest paper has just been accepted in NeuroImage; "On-line plasticity in spoken sentence comprehension: Adapting to time-compressed speech", Patti Adank and Joseph T. Devlin. Patti also had a paper accepted in JASA on her speech learning data ("Perceptual learning of time-compressed and natural fast speech"). Well done.
- Ray Wilkinson's paper; "The collaborative construction of non- serious episodes of interaction by non-speaking children with cerebral palsy and their speaking peers." was published in Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics (23, 8, 561-575). Well done.
- Congratulations to Gorana Pobric whose paper has now appeared in Cortex (G. Pobric, M.A. Lambon Ralph, & E. Jefferies (2009). "The role of the anterior temporal lobes in the comprehension of concrete and abstract words: rTMS evidence." Cortex, 45, 1104-1110).
- Faye Corbett had her paper published in Brain (F. Corbett, E. Jefferies, S. Ehsan, & M.A. Lambon Ralph (2009). "Different impairments of semantic cognition in semantic dementia and semantic aphasia: Evidence from the non-verbal domain." Brain, 132, 2593-2608).
Summer was also busy for Clinical and Health Psychology (CHP) who too had a number of papers accepted / published. Congratulations to Luke Jones and Alex Wood who both had two papers each accepted. Details are as follows:
- Ruth S Ogden; John Wearden; Jones, LA, "Are memories for duration modality specific?" in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
- Jakub Spati; Mirjam Munch; Katharina Blatter; Jones, LA; Christian Cajochen, "It's a question of time: Impact of age, sleep pressure, and circadian phase on time-of-day estimates points to possible interval timing basis of temporal orientation" in Behavioural Brain Research.
- Wood, A. M & Joseph, S., "The Absence of Positive Psychological (Eudemonic) Well-being as a Risk Factor For Depression: A Ten Year Cohort Study" in Journal of Affective Disorders.
- Linley, P. A.; Maltby, J.; Wood, AM; Osborne, G.; Hurling, R., "Measuring happiness: The higher order factor structure of subjective and psychological well-being measures." in Personality and Individual Differences.
In Audiology and Deafness (A&D), Colette McKay's paper "Amplitude modulation and loudness in cochlear implantees" was accepted into the Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology.
Grants awarded
- Congratulations to Sarah Peters whose bid for an NIHR funded NorthWest Research Design Service (as co-applicant) was successful (the panel even asked the NIHR to relay their compliments on the standard of the application and presentation). Sarah will head up the qualitative strand of the research. The funding will allow CHP to employ a Research Fellow from April 2010. Well done, this is an excellent achievement.
- Congratulations to Ray Wilkinson, Karen Sage and Paul Conroy of CNLD. They won a new NIHR fellowship for Sarah Fox (currently an SLT in Norwich) so that she can undertake a PhD. Details below:
Title: Extending and evaluating conversation-focused therapy: Optimizing the ability of couples where one partner has aphasia to cope with conversation
Supervisors: Ray Wilkinson, Karen Sage, Paul Conroy
Award: £218,320
Dates: January 2010 - January 2013