Dr Michelle St Clair 

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

Michelle is currently working with the Manchester Language Study, a longitudinal study lead by Professor Gina Conti-Ramsden for the last 13 years. This study has followed a group of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) throughout their development, from age 7 onwards.

Michelle's research focuses on analysing the longitudinal trends throughout a ten year time span, from when the children were 7 to 17. Specifically, she is looking at how their language, literacy and social skills develop throughout this time period.

Michelle's other interests include how language develops under normal circumstances. Her previous research focused on how grammatical categories are learnt during language acquisition. Specifically, she 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).

More recently she has become involved in the role of sleep in cognitive processes, specifically implicit learning tasks.

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.

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, in press.

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.