Dr Anne Hesketh PhD, MSc, BSc, MRCSLT

• Member of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists
• Registered Speech and Language Therapist with the Health Professions Council
• International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association
• Institute of Health Sciences (IHS) Child Health Research Network
• Honorary Membership of the NIHR Faculty, January 2009-December 2011

My research involves both developmental and acquired communication problems, the uniting theme being to prove and to improve the effectiveness of speech and language therapy for people with communication problems.

My main field of interest is children with speech disorder where current topics are: 

• the use of phoneme awareness in speech intervention - to what extent is this necessary and possible in pre-literate children?;
• phonological representations of children with speech disorder - how can we best assess internal representations, is there evidence that the phonological representations of some children with speech disorder are less specified?;
• the measurement of change, measurement of intelligibility - intelligibility is an important functional aim but it is difficult to measure accurately and quickly;
• service delivery models - what frequency and length of intervention is the most efficient to achieve functional improvement in speech; is group or individual therapy best; does an indirect consultancy work for children with speech disorder?. 

I am also involved in a large project (the ACTNoW study) investigating the effectiveness of intervention for people with communication problems following stroke. This unites my interest in outcome measurement with my belief in the importance of functional, interactional speech as an important focus for research.

I am interested in the use of complex grammar and the structure of narratives in both child and adult language and am currently involved in a project on priming complex grammar in the narratives of primary school children.

I am a member of the Clinical Neuroscience and Language Disorders research group in the School of Psychological Sciences.

Keywords

speech disorder

effectiveness

speech and language therapy

phonology

intelligibility

Course unit tutor for:

• HCDI 20141 Clinical Linguistics 1
• HCDI 20010 Developmental Speech Disorders

• 1981  BSc (Hons) Speech Pathology and Therapy. The University of Manchester
• 1991  MSc, Agrammatism; syntactic and morphological problems in acquired aphasia. The University of Manchester 
• 2005, PhD; Effective Practice in Speech and Language Therapy. The University of Manchester

• Dr Catherine Adams - School of Psychological Sciences
• Dr Audrey Bowen - School of Psychological Sciences
• Professor Barbara Dodd - City University
• Dr Vicky Joffe - City University
• Professor Andrew Long - University of Leeds
• Dr Ludovica Serratrice - School of Psychological Sciences