Dr Michelle St Clair 

Michelle is a postdoc working with Professor Gina Conti-Ramsden and Professor Andrew Pickles at the University of Manchester. 

Specific Language Impairment

I am currently working with the Manchester Language Study, a longitudinal study lead by Professor Gina Conti-Ramsden for the last 14 years. This study has followed a group of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) throughout their development, from age 7 onwards.

My current research focuses on analysing the longitudinal development of these children throughout a ten year time span, from when the children were 7 to 17. Specifically, I am looking at how their language, literacy, nonverbal intelligence skills develop throughout this time period. Additionally, I have investigated the prevalence of behavioural, emotional and social difficulties from childhood to adolescence.

Apart from the longitudinal development research, Michelle is also analysing behavioural genetics data to investigate familial traits in early language development and academic difficulties as well as looking at whether there are autistic-like behavioural traits in the families of our children who have had primary problems with language.

Normal Language Development

My research interests also extend to how language develops under normal circumstances. My previous research focused on how grammatical categories are learnt during language acquisition. Specifically, I have investigated how the combination of distribution and phonological linguistic cues allow learners to converge on grouping words according to their correct grammatical or syntactic role (i.e., grouping nouns with other nouns, and verbs with other verbs). In conducting this research I have used artificial language learning experiments and also analysed child directed speech using computational techniques.

A newer area of research interest for me is how sleep consolidation may aid in the acquisition of language. I have conducted a pilot study that has found evidence that sleep may be critical in the abstraction of linguistic structure from known to novel instances. I hope to continue this work in the coming years.

I am also very interested in how language structure and language learning may be intricately linked. I have conducted research investigating the link between general learning mechanisms (the ease of learning from succeeding cues) and the prevalence of the suffixing preference across the world's languages (please see the below Cognitive Science paper if interested). I also hope to continue and expand on this work in the coming years.
 

Publications:

St. Clair, M. C., Monaghan, P., & Ramscar, M. (2009). Relationships between language structure and language learning: The suffixing preference and grammatical categorization. Cognitive Science, 33, 1317-1329.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122587196/issue

St. Clair, M.C., Durkin, K., Conti-Ramsden, G., & Pickles, A. (2010) Growth of reading skills in children with a history of specific language impairment (SLI): The role of autistic symptomatology and language related abilities. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 28, 109-131.

http://bpsoc.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpsoc/bjdp/2010/00000028/00000001/art00007

Michelle completed an MSc and PhD at the University of York.  She became a member of the Division of Human Communication and Deafness within the School of Psychological Science at the University of Manchester in October 2007.