SSRC: people & other news

For announcements of new items: see the icon below.Older items are below, indexed by year: 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995

2008 [back to top]

2007 [back to top]

Changes, Arrivals and Departures

• Marko Liker makes a welcome return for a 6 month research fellowship on the EdSST scheme (2007-2008) , working primarily woth Fiona Gibbon.
• Welcome to Laura Herbst, working with Ineke Mennen on intonation in children.
• Welcome to Sylvia Mattl, PhD student
• Welcome to Dr Eleanor Lawson who joins us on the ESRC research grant into sociolinguistics and ultrasound. Eleanor is a sociolinguist and phonetician who has undertaken research into sound change and variation in Glasgow and Devon. Her PhD was from Glasgow University, and most recently has been teaching Phonetics at Oxford University.

Other People News

• Congratulations to one of our 2006 SLT graduates, Rebecca Rodger, who has won the RCSLT Student Research Prize 2006 for her project "An investigation of the quantitative and qualitative differences in expressive langauge and non-verbal ability between school-age children with diagnoses of Asperger's syndrome (AS) or higher-functioning autism (HFA)." The RCSLT say there was extremely strong competition with SLT programmes from universities such as UCL, Newcastle and Manchester University (and elsewhere throughout the UK) entering their best research projects in the competition. What makes this an even more remarkable achievement is our astounding record of winning this award! Students from Speech and Hearing Sciences have won the prize in 4 out of the 6 years in which the competition has run, and been a runner-up once. This reflects the excellence of our students and the importance we attach to their honours reserach project. Rebecca is now a PhD student in SHS, funded by the Down's Syndrome Association.
• Congartulations to John Laver, who was awarded a Royal Gold Medal by the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2007) for his “outstanding contributions to the Humanities and Social Sciences, particularly in the field of phonetics, and his inspired academic leadership”. [link]
• Congratulations to Bill Hardcastle, who was awarded an honorary D.Sc. from Napier University (2007). [link]

2006 [back to top]

Changes, Arrivals and Departures

• Welcome to Dr Mariam Hartinger joins our group today and will be with us for the next 12 months. Some of you may already have met Mariam at the EPG symposium. She is a post-doctoral Research Fellow from ZAS in Berlin and has funding from the German Research Council. She will be working with Dr Ineke Mennen and Prof Bill Hardcastle on speech characteristics of Parkinson's Disease during her time here and will be based in room 120.
• Welcome to Tanja Kocjančič, new PhD student funded by the Marie Curie EdSST scheme, based in room 112.
• Welcome to Rebecca Rodger, new PhD student, funded by the Down Syndrome Society, based in room 120.
• A more permanent welcome to Felix Schaeffler, who will be the research fellow on Ineke Mennen's ESRC grant on intonation and language differences, in a part-time role over the next two years.
• Sue Peppé took a 2-day research visit to the Laboratoire d'Imagerie Moléculaire et Fonctionnelle, French Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM), University of Bordeaux (France). Purpose: initiating the design of a French version of PEPS-C. September 2006.
• Ineke Mennen took an invited 14-day research visit to Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (Netherlands). Purpose: working with Dr Aoju Chen on a research proposal on bilingual/second language acquisition of intonation. Visit dates: 9 to 23 October 2006.
• Dr Mitsuhiro Nakami from Nihon University visted in September to undertake some research with Dr Alan Wrench, looking at the MOCHA -TIMIT articulatory database.
• New staff in Audiology in 2006 are Dr Pauline Campbell, Dr Jo Edwards, and Dr Ben Matthews - see the audiology site.
• Welcome to Dr Felix Schaeffer, who has arrived to work on the project "Development of a computerized voice health-check for the work-place", May - July. He is from Munich, Bavaria, and studied Psycholinguistics, Phonetics and Speech Pathology there. In 2001 he left Munich for the Far North and did a PhD 300 km south of the polar circle at Umeå University, Sweden. In 2005 he moved to Edinburgh.
• Ineke Mennen has been awarded a senior lectureship.
• Joanna Keating joined us in January 2006 as research assistant for the final six months of the ESRC-funded Prosody in Asperger's project till July. She was organising perception experiments and carrying out the acoustic analysis of prosodic data collected using PEPS-C. She completed her Master's degree in Speech Science at Edinburgh University where she worked on perception experiments in 2005.
• Marion Rutherford is an experienced speech and language therapist who has been associated with the Prosody in Autism projects from the outset (i.e. since 2002) as a co-applicant and advisor on clinical aspects. From December 2005 to March 2006 she was seconded from the NHS as RA on the Prosody in Asperger's project; she collected data and had particular responsibility for modifying the PEPS-C test so that it can be used easily by clinicians.
  

Visits

• Sharynne McLeod is here on sabbatical 13 April - 12 May 2006, funded by a British Academy Visiting Fellowship. She is a senior lecturer and active researcher in language acquisition in the School of Teacher Education at CSU, having been in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders at The University of Sydney for 10 years. Her homepage is here.
• Stéphane Mortreux from Aix en Provance is visiting from 14 to 23 February, and again from 25th April, looking at EPG.

Other People News

• Congratulations to Bill Hardcastle, who has been awarded the Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran Award for the application of science and technology for the benefit of the society by The Foundation for Science and Technology. The Award was made following a lecture to an invited audience of leading UK scientists, members of the House of Lords and senior government officials at the Royal Society, in London on 5th December 2006. [link]
• The following article was in the top 10 most downloaded articles in Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics April 2005-April 2006

  GIBBON, FE., ELLIS, L. and CRAMPIN, L. Articulatory placement for /t/, /d/, /k/ and /g/ targets in school age children with speech disorders associated with cleft palate. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 2004, 18, 6-8, 391-404.

2005 [back to top]

Changes, Arrivals and Departures

• Liesbet Borman and Esther de Leeuw join us in September as new PhD students, so a warm welcome to them.
• Christine DePlacido joined Speech and Hearing Sciences as a member of staff in August 2005. She has worked in the health service for 30 years as an audiologist/clinical scientist in Lanarkshire, Edinburgh and Fife. She will continue to study for her Ph D in Audiology at Queen Margaret University College.
• Dr Susan Swart also joined as part of the new Audiology team. She has a background in both speech-language therapy and audiology but has spent most of her working life as an audiologist. She lectured at universities in South Africa, worked at audiology units in tertiary level academic hospitals, consulted for government in the field of disability and rehabilitation policy, worked for the Deaf Federation of South Africa to develop a national screening and early intervention programme (for hearing impairment) and was a member of the Health Professions Council in SA (standards setting and quality assurance of training programmes). She has a particular interest in electrical testing, auditory evoked potentials and otoacoustic emissions. She also worked in a private practice dispensing hearing aids. Susan says "I like trout fishing (no good stories to tell you!) and harbour a secret longing to own a Harley Davidson! I have Scottish ancestry too."
• Dr Robin Barr-Hamilton is the third member of the team to join SHS. He is clinical lecturer in Audiology. He originally graduated with an honours degree in physics, then worked in the NHS for some 28 years as audiological scientist in Manchester and Edinburgh.
• The MRC project "Assessment and treatment of impaired speech motor control in children with Down's Syndrome" begins in October. The project is for three years and will be led by Prof Bill HArdcastle (as PI), Dr Sara Wood and Professor Jennifer Wishart (University of Edinburgh). Two research fellows with considerable experience have been appointed, namely Joanne McCann (transferring from the the ESRC PEP-C project, though she will stay on that 20% FTE until April 2006) and Claire Timmins (50% FTE). Claire comes from a speech science and linguistics background and has an MPhil in Speech and Language Technology from Trinity College Dublin. She has worked as a Speech and Language Therapy Assistant and has lectured in Clinical Phonetics and Phonology at the University of Sheffield. Currently she is coming to the end of a three-year ESRC project led by Dr Jane Stuart-Smith (University of Glasgow) on accent variation and change in Glasgow adolescents and the social factors that affect these changes. For some of you Claire needs no introduction as you have already published joint papers with her. Both research fellows will be based in room 120.

Visits

• Welcome back to Dr Ben Matthews, who gained his PhD in the department. [cf here]. He rejoins SHS as a temporary lecturer for 2005-2006 in September.
• Three visitors from Sweden are coming on Wednesday 28th October to see the EPG clinic: Miriam Hartstein and Karin Huddénius, who are speech and language therapists, and Martha Björnström, a dentist. Contact Joanne for more details.
• Dr Susanne Fuchs, a recent graduate of QMUC, and Jana Brunner are visiting from ZAS Berlin to do EPG recordings in September.
• Pastora Martínez Castilla is visiting from September - December 2005 as a visiting researcher in the SSRC. Pastora is from the Department of Basic Psychology in the Faculty of Psychology of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She is a member of the Research staff there developing her doctoral thesis "Musical and prosodic abilities in Williams syndrome". She has obtained funding from the Ministry of Education and Science (Spanish Government) to come to Edinburgh and she will be working mainly with Sue (Peppe) during this time.
• Marko Liker (mliker@ffzg.hr), a PhD student and a junior assistant at the Department of Phonetics, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb Croatia, is on a two-month visit to the SSRC (10 January – 10 March 2005). He received a scholarship from the British Scholarship Trust in order to learn about EPG data collection and analysis. Since no research in electropalatography was carried out in Croatia, this is a valuable preparation for his PhD thesis “EPG Study of Croatian Sounds”. During his stay he has been working under the supervision of Dr Alan Wrench and Dr Fiona Gibbon. His activities include: transferring ACCOR project data from tapes to hard drive, annotation of segments in Articulate Assistant software, EPG recordings of Croatian nonsense words and finally a cross linguistic EPG investigation of affricates.
• Alain Marchal (home page) visited in November.

Other People News

• PhD completions (pdfs mostly available via here) from
  • Helen McGrane (2005) An investigation into the ability of adults with post-stroke aphasia to learn new vocabulary. PhD, QMUC.
  • Olga Gordeeva (2005) Language Interaction in the Bilingual Acquisition of Sound Structure: a longitudinal study of vowel quality, duration and vocal effort in pre-school children speaking Scottish English and Russian. PhD, QMUC.
  • Susanne Fuchs (2005) Articulatory Correlates of the Voicing Contrast in Alveolar Obstruent Production in German. PhD, QMUC. [Revised version published by ZAS and available online there, and for convenience here]

2004 [back to top]

Changes, Arrivals and Departures

• Fiona Gibbon has been awarded a chair, and will take up her professorship later in 2004.
• Prof Fiona Gibbon has been appointed as Head of Speech and Language Sciences.
• Welcome to Dr Ivan Yuen and Alice Lee, who joined the CLEFTNET UK project On November 1st. Alice is a speech therapist who graduated from the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, in 1999. She worked as a research assistant on a project on dysarthria before undertaking her PhD study on perceptual and instrumental analysis of hypernasality in the same department. Her research interests include perceptual and instrumental assessment as well as treatment of speech disorders due to structural anomalies or neurological impairment. Ivan recently graudated from the PhD programme in University of Edinburgh working on the the effect of intonation on perception of Cantonese tones, in particular on the effect of downtrend. Prior to that, he was working as an RA in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. There were awards in 2003 from BBC Children in Need and from the Henry Smith Charity, a bigger and more ambitious approach to EPG treatment for cleft palate clients has become possible. All regional centres throughout the UK who would like to participate are involved. The project will operate in a similar but more sophisticated way to the original project CLEFTNET Scotland, enabling in addition to actual treatment the creation of a unique and substantial database of cleft palate speech and treatment outcomes. The restricted website for collaborators is http://www.cleftnet.org.uk.
• Lianne Carroll has joined QMUC in January 2004. She is a ASHA certified speech and language therapist, and has worked for 9 years as a clinician in Massachusetts. Lianne is beginning a PhD research programme on the theory of mind and prosody in children with autism.
• Rosmawati Aman has recently joined SLS to carry out a PhD project into cleft palate speech involving EPG and other instrumental techniques.
• Dr James M Scobbie has been offered a permanent post of Senior Research Fellow.
• Lianne Carroll, one of our PhD students, took up a part-time post as research assistant on the ESRC Asperger's project on 1st November.
• Joanne McCann has been awarded a new contract as RA on the ESRC Research project. Joanne is a graduate of the department with extensive experience in this area, having worked on a previous related project on prosody in autism as part of the same team. See Grant awards (above) and the Autism link to her project pages.

Visits

• Koen Sebregts (http://www.let.uu.nl/~Koen.Sebregts/personal/) will be a visiting affiliate to the research centre for 2 weeks in October/November, to do some ultrasound recordings as part of his research into variation in Dutch /r/. He will be working with James M Scobbie on a small project carried out in collaboration with a large joint research effort of the universities of Nijmegen and Utrecht in The Netherlands, and that of Brussels in Belgium (2001-2005). That project’s supervisors are Prof. Van Hout (Nijmegen), Prof. Zonneveld (Utrecht) and Dr. Van der Velde (originally Brussels, now Utrecht). The researchers affiliated are Dr. Van Bezooijen (Nijmegen), and the Ph.D. students Evie Tops (Brussels) and Koen Sebregts (Utrecht). The overall funding is by their two respective national science funders, namely FWO for Belgium and NWO for The Netherlands. The overall budget for the full project is €800,000 (€200,000 annually). QMUC is participating on a self-financing basis for the goal of collaborative research development, and to pilot techniques intended for future funded research by Scobbie. Sebregts’ costs in coming to Edinburgh are met by his Dutch/Belgian project.
• Caroline Wright, artist in residence at Addenbrooks Hospital in Cambridge, is visiting in early November. Her interest is in visual images relating to speech and communication. Janet Beck is hosting the visit, with Jim Scobbie.

Other People News

• Dr Janet Beck has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.
• Prof John Laver retired in July, and rejoined SLS as Emeritus Professor to continue his research.
• Prof Bill Hardcastle has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.
• Prof. Bill Hardcastle and Prof. John Laver have been awarded honorary fellowships of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists
• Dr. Fiona Gibbon has been awarded a fellowship f the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.
• Prof. Bill Hardcastle has been awarded a Royal award: Contribution of Pioneers to the life of the Nation.
• Robin Lickley was invited to participate in a BBC Radio 4 Science slot programme on Disfluency "Wrestling with Words", and appeared in the programme when it was broadcast in 2004. You can visit the BBC site and listen to the programme at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/wrestling.shtml.
• Samina Ghazi has won the Travers Reid Award, a £300 annual award given by the Michael Palin Centre. It is open to students who have completed a project in the area of stammering over the last 12 months.
• Cassie Mayo, Jim Scobbie, Nigel Hewlett and Daphne Waters' 2003 paper "The influence of phonemic awareness development on acoustic cue weighting strategies in children's speech perception" has been awarded the 2003 ASHA (http://www.asha.org) Editor's Award for the Hearing section of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. This award is given annually for the most outstanding article published in the calendar year. The paper appears in theJournal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. 46: 1184-1196. See http://www.asha.org/NR/rdonlyres/11165B63-C24F-4291-BEAB-608383094F45/0/04ASHA_Awards.pdf The paper is a report of research undertaken by Cassie as part of her PhD, completed here in SLS in 2000. Since graduation, Cassie has cemented her reputation in perception research with grant awards and further publications at the University of Edinburgh.
• The Journal Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics has published a Special Edition, a Festschrift for William J Hardcastle on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday. This issue of the journal, edited by Fiona Gibbon, features 18 papers by colleagues and former students, of which four are authored by members of the department.
• Alison MacDonald is hosting a psychosocial workshop in Deafness management, specifically focussing on adults with acquired hearing loss who have recieved a cochlear implant. Participants include Anne Kennedy, Hearing Therapist and Sharon Wilson, Audiological Scientist both from Edinburgh Royal infirmary. Also Clare Sheridan, specialist SLT advisor to Cochlear Europe who are supporting the meeting.
• One of our SLS graduates, Rachel Hamade (formerly Rachel German) has won the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists' Best Honours Project Prize for 2003. Her project is entitled "A Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation of a New Automatic Occlusion Device for Laryngectomees". Hearty congratulations to both Rachel and her project supervisor Nigel Hewlett. A poster based on the project was presented at ICPLA in Lafayette USA in February 2004, authors Rachel Hamade, Nigel Hewlett and Emer Scanlon (Emer is a specialist SLT working in oncology in the NHS in Edinburgh).The RCSLT project competition has run for 4 years now, and final year projects from students graduating from SLS have won first prize in 3 out of these 4 years, and one of the 2 runners-up the other year. It is a highly contested national competition, with entries from SLT courses throughout the UK, including courses that run within 5* departments such as at UCL, Newcastle and Manchester.
• A PhD Thesis completion (cf here)
  • Richard Mullooly (2004) An Electromagnetic-Articulograph Study of Alternating [r] and the Effects of Emphatic Stress on the Articulation of Rhotic Consonants. PhD, QMUC. [pdf]

• The 16th Annual Meeting of the European Academy of Childhood Disability (EACD) ‘Evidence to Empowerment’ is being held in Edinburgh 7th-9th October 2004. Fiona Gibbon is on the organising committee, and other staff in SLS have been very involved in planning this conference. Dr Anne O'Hare is the president of the European Academy of Childhood Disability, and she says "I extend a warm invitation to you all for the 16th Annual Meeting of the European Academy of Childhood Disability (EACD). Our local organising committee has benefited from its multidisciplinary composition of paediatrics, paediatric neurology, speech and language therapy, physiotherapy and occupational therapy and the advise of the EACD scientific committee to come up with an impressive programme that contains something for everyone working in the field of childhood disability. The very central venue is the beautiful Assembly Rooms opened in 1787 and worth a visit in their own right." Delegates are also being invited to tour our QMUC speech science lab during the conference, as background to some of the excellent keynote talks on speech and communication disorders already scheduled. See www.eacd2004.com for more details. Abstracts to be submitted by 1st May 2004, and the call for papers in pdf format is here. Sue Peppé and Joanne McCann are participating in a satellite session on Autism.
  
• The Centre for Integrated Healthcare Research. This £2.45 million initiative is bringing together expertise from a range of health services including speech and language therapy, nursing, midwifery, physiotherapy, radiography, dietetics for the first time. The centre will bring healthcare specialists from Queen Margaret University College, University of Edinburgh and Napier University to work in partnership with NHS Lothian, NHS Borders and NHS Lanarkshire. An international recruitment drive is to begin immediately to appoint a director to lead the project. Funding for the project has been provided by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, the Scottish Executive Health Department, NHS Scotland and the Chief Scientist’s Office. There has been a great deal of press attention for CIH - see for example The Scotsman The Centre for Integrated Healthcare Research (CIHR) based at QMUC has appointed Professor James Law from City University London as Director from 8 November.
  
  The Centre for Integrated Healthcare Research is a new centre set up to increase research capacity in nursing, midwifery and the allied health professions in South-East Scotland and to extend and develop healthcare research generally. The centre was established earlier this year following the successful bid for £2.45 million from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) by a consortium of higher education institutions (QMUC, Edinburgh and Napier Universities) and NHS partners (Lothian, the Borders and Lanarkshire NHS trusts) led by QMUC. Research partnerships will be established across Scotland to link researchers and clinical practitioners and it is anticipated that the CIHR will come to play a major role in developing research in these areas at a national and international level.
  
  A fellow of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, Professor Law has played an active role in developing research in the field of speech and language disability in children. He has long had a particular interest in interdisciplinary and applied research as the most effective way of providing meaningful and useful research. Most recently Professor Law has concentrated his research in the area of 'Early Years and Parenting' and amongst other projects he is currently examining the relationship between language and social disadvantage for the Sure Start Unit in England.
  
  Professor Law graduated from the University of East Anglia, Norwich in 1978 with a BA (Hons) in Linguistics and attained his PhD at City University where he has worked since 1989. Prior to that he was a Speech and Language Therapist at City and Hackney Health Authority. He was voted one of the top ten speech and Language Therapists in the UK in 2002 and is on the professional advisory board for Therapy Weekly magazine and has been on the editorial board of a number of academic journals.
• Graduation results for 2004: congratulations to this year's students. There are photos!
• SLS ran a week-long post-graduate course on 'Eating, Drinking and Swallowing difficulties' in June.
• Ioulia Grichkowtsova and Olga Gordeeva has been awarded free registration and accommodation by the Max Planck Institute in order to attend their prestigious PhD student conference on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Bilingualism, June 28-July 2 2004 in Nijmegen. See http://www.mpi.nl/world/tubbs/main.html
• 
  

2003 [back to top]

Changes, Arrivals and Departures

• Dr Daphne Waters took early retirement and leaves us much the better off thanks to her enormous energy and commitment to the department and the students over two decades, and we are all conscious already of how much we will miss her contribution, not least to the smooth running of the course.
• Farewell too, to Professor Stansfield (see other news, below for more details).
• Welcome to Dr Sara Wood and Dr Ann Hodson. Both have good established links with the subject area: following her undergraduate MA degree in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, Ann completed her PhD at QMUC in 1999, and then completed her BSc in Speech and Language Therapy here in 2001. Since then she has been working as a therapist and involved in a number of research projects. She joined us in October. Sara's undergraduate BA degree was from the University of Reading, and following a period as a therapist in Canada, she came to QMUC as a postgraduate, and completed her PhD here in 1997. Since then she has been working as a therapist. Sara is on maternity leave from October-March 2004. Ann's appointment immediately follows her period of maternity leave, so congratulations are due to both on those grounds too.
• Welcome too to Dr Maria Wolters who has joined us as aresearcher (part-time), working initially with Bill Hardcastle on a small project into Parkinson's Disease, and undertaking lecturing work on linguistics in 2003-4. Maria has come to us from Rhetorical Systems, a world-leading speech-technology company based in Edinburgh. Maria is a phonetician and computational linguist with expertise in German speech synthesis and interests in pragmatics, prosody, corpus linguistics, and spoken dialogue systems. Maria has a Ph.D. in computational linguistics (2001, University of Bonn, Germany) and a M.Sc. in computer science (1997, University of Bonn, Germany). Her M.Sc. thesis was on text-to-speech synthesis for Scottish Gaelic; her Ph.D. was about the notions of "given" and "new" information in discourse analysis. From 1997 to 2001 she taught phonetics and computational linguistics at the Institute for Communication Research and Phonetics in Bonn. Maria is German; apart from her mother tongue, she speaks English, some French and some Spanish.
• Welcome also to Ms Yolanda Vazquez Alvarez, who joined us on a six month contract to research into the use of ultrasound in as a laboratory technique. She is working with many people in the department as we develop our expertise in this area. From Spain, Yolanda studied for her first degree, Lic. in English Philology, at Salamanca (University) near Madrid, graduating in 2000. Her introduction to speech science was an MSc degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences at University College London (2001). Her master's dissertation was on Text-to-Speech (TTS). From January 2002 to June of this year she also was working for Rhetorical Systems here in Edinburgh as a development engineer, evaluating their synthetic voices against possible competitors. She was also involved in the synthesis of Spanish voices. Her research interests include: the importance of standard tests in the evaluation of TTS systems and aiming to improve the evaluation methodology; and in experimental phonetics, especially in the study of the articulation of speech sounds. Yolanda is a Spanish/Gallego native speaker. She is fluent in English and French, but, a true European, she can also understand Portuguese and Italian and has studied Dutch as part of her undergraduate degree.
• Welcome to Ms Natalia Zharkova, who was awarded a 3-year QMUC postgraduate bursery from September 2003 to study for a PhD. Natalia obtained her MA degree in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the Department of Phonetics, State University of St. Petersburg. Her MA project title was: "Acquisition of the phonological system in child language", looking at children's speech in Russian. Natalia's PhD project is aimed at answering linguistic questions using evidence from articulatory phonetics (ultrasound).
• Dr Ben Matthews, sadly for us and luckily for them, is leaving to take up a job in admin at the Edinburgh and East of Scotland Deaf Society (EESDS web site http://www.deafsociety.org/) at the end of March.
• A sad farewell from us to our admin secretary Kirsty Walker, who is already greatly missed in the department by staff and students. We wish her well in future.
• Good luck and bon voyage to Bryony Vernal who leaves at the end of May for excitement in New Zealand! Haste ye back.

Visits

• Kamini Gadhok (Chief Executive, Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists) visited the Scottish Centre for Research into Speech Disability and the Department of Speech and Language Sciences. 10th January.
  Shadow Health minister Nicola Sturgeon MSP visited the Scottish Centre for Research into Speech Disability and the Department of Speech and Language Sciences. 23rd January.
• Prof Jonathan Harrington, Univ of Kiel, Germany (research collaborator) visited on 20th February.
  Prof Robert Morris (Psychology, Edinburgh University) visited on 28th February.
  Major General and Mrs Barr (McRoberts Trust) visited to see recent developments on the 25th February.
  Didier Demolin , University of Brussels. Research seminar on MRI and co-articulation, plus discussions on collaborative research, 7-10 April.
• Monika Pukli, PhD student looking at sociolinguistics in Ayrshire from University of Toulouse. The visit is part of her research training programme. 22-25 April.
• Professor Maureen Stone from University of Maryland, USA, a world leader in the use of ultrasound for speech visualisation, visited SLS during the week beginning 12th May to discuss our ultrasound project.
  On 5th-6th November Ineke Mennen is attending a workshop together with Caroline Fery, Carlos Gussenhoven and Bob Ladd on cross-linguistic variation in pitch/intonation in Potsdam. Their plan is to compare Berlin German, Southern English (at the moment, they will also look at Scottish later on), and Dutch.
• Emily Groenewald, lecturer in speech science and acoustic phonetics, and Chair of the Research Committee in the Department of Communication Pathology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her special interest is speech production of cochlear implant users. 22 October.
  On 23rd September we were visited by a group from the Dept of Neurology and Locomotion, Division of Speech Pathology, Linkoping University of Health, Linkoping, Sweden.

Other People News

• Congratulations to Dr Jois Stansfied, head of subject, who was appointed to a professorial chair in the department of Psychology and Speech Pathology at Manchester Metropolitan University. We send our very best wishes for this well-deserved recognition of her standing in the field.
• Dr Sara Wood was awarded £640 by Chest, Heart & Stroke Medical Charity to further her research on speech disorder in Aphasia. The grant will enable her to attend the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics conference in Hong Kong in May.
• Congratulations to Cherry Kelsey (2002 graduate) who was runner-up in the RCSLT student research prize competition for her 4th year honours project.
  

Other News

• Representatives of the dept (2 undergraduate students, one recent SLT graduate and 2 PhD graduates), representatives of QMUC, and guests attended the presentation of the Queen's Anniversary Prize at Buckingham Palace and at the Guildhall in London, England, on 19th February.
• Ineke Mennen collaborating with Prof. Caroline Féry, Frank Kuegler and Ruben van de Vijver (University of Potsdam, Germany) , Prof. Carlos Gussenhoven (University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands), Prof. Bob Ladd (University of Edinburgh) in a project investigating cross-linguistic differences in the realisation of pitch accents. Each group of researchers will be conducting the same experiments with the aim to make a systematic comparison of the realisation of pitch accents in German, Dutch, Standard Southern English and Scottish English.
• Fiona Gibbon made an invited contribution to "Ask the Expert" for the Apraxia Kids Monthly Newsletter in April 2003.
• Fiona Gibbon and Professor Bruce Murdoch were invited to give run a one-week EPG workshop in Goteborg in October 2003.
• Robin Lickley has been invited to examine Robert Eklund's PhD thesis in Linkoping, Sweden on Sept 26, 2003.
• Jim Scobbie examined Zoe Evans's thesis, MacQuarrie University, Australia: "Hyperspeech and Hypospeech in Multiple Dialects of English".

2002 [back to top]

Changes, Arrivals and Departures

• Fiona Gibbon was awarded a Readership.
• Janet Beck was promoted to Senior Lecturer.
• Welcome to our new PhD student, Ioulia Grichkovtsova (from Russia/Moscow, and more recently from a masters degree in France). Her topic is the perception and production of emotion in the speech of bilingual children between 6 and 12 years old.
• Welcome back to Marie Cluness, graduate of the department, this time as EPG clinician in the SCRSD. After 3 years of negotiation, we have established an NHS funded EPG clinic to run in the Scottish Centre for Research into Speech Disability. Marie will run a research clinic on Thursday mornings with Bryony Vernal.
• Welcome in a different capacity to Joanne McCann who begins work on the two-year project on autistic children's reponse to prosody. For more details, click here.
  

Visits

• Dr Margaret Cook visited the department on 24th September.
• Mary Craig from Lloyds TSB, whose Foundation funds clinical research in the dept, visited on 7th October.
• BBC Birmingham visited SLS on 16th October to film for a 10 minute feature on their "Inside out" program (http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/). Their item is on the West Midlands' accent, and were here to film our unique articulatory laboratory which can be used to study regional variation in accents.
• We welcomed Monika Pukli, a PhD student from University of Toulouse for a visit to the lab. She will be undertaking research into Scottish dialect in Ayrshire under the supervision of Jacques Durand.

Other People News

• John Laver, Sarah Hawkins & Noel Nguyen were successful in their bid for a British Academy grant (£5,736) for the ICSA Workshop "Temporal integration in the perception of speech" (8-10 Apr 02, Aix-en-Provence).
• Six students from the EEO in Athens will be graduating on Saturday, October 2, 2002 from their Logopaedics course, which our department is validating. They will be visiting the department for 2 days together with their Lecturer and Clinic Director. We have organised a programme with talks, demonstrations and some visits in the clinic.
• One of our recent graduates, Cherry Kelsey, has been shortlisted for the RCSLT prize for best honours project. The outcome should be known at the beginning of 2003.
• Susanne Fuchs has been successful in her application for QMUC's Princess Alice Fund travel grant. The money will go towards her attendance at Williamsburg Eleventh Biennial Conference on Motor Speech (14-17 March) where she will be presenting two papers and visit a university to give an invited talk.
• Congratulations to Kirsty Walker, who successfully completed her SVQ Level 3 in Administration (in double quick time).
• Susanne Fuchs has been selected to participate in the NATO Advanced Study Institute "Dynamics of Speech Production and Perception" in Il Ciocco, Italy, from June 23 - July 7, 2002.

Other News

• Queen's Anniversary Prize. The Department of Speech and Language Sciences at Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh has been honoured for its pioneering work in the clinical application of speech science. This work has brought significant benefits to people with speech disabilities in the UK and across the world. Uniquely in the field of education, this prize is part of the national honours system, and the process involves fierce competition from higher and further education institutions throughout the UK. It is the most distinguished award that can be made to any UK higher and further education institution.
  
  In the UK alone, more than 2.5 million people have a communication disability and Professor Joan Stringer, Principal of Queen Margaret University College, said: "Speech impairment can have a devastating impact on a person's education and employment prospects as well as their social and emotional well-being. The prize recognises a decade of internationally renowned work by our department to improve the quality of life for hundreds people throughout the world."
  
  Professor Bill Hardcastle, Dean of Research at the University College, said: "This is the first time that a Prize has been made in the area of speech and language therapy and speech science. This award will have an extremely positive impact not just on Queen Margaret University College but on the speech and language profession as a whole.
  
  A spokesperson from the Royal Anniversary Trust, which presents the Prizes, commented "The University College's portfolio of innovative procedures has significantly enhanced diagnosis and therapy for people with speech disabilities. In pioneering new techniques, the University College has forged strong links with health service professionals and with researchers around the world and has gained an international reputation for its specialised undergraduate and postgraduate training."
  A press release with brief details can be found at http://www.qmuc.ac.uk/marketing/press_releases/prAnnPrize141102.htm and a full pdf version of a poster giving a more comprehensive overview of QMUC's submission can be found from the links on http://sls.qmuc.ac.uk/NEWS/qap_top.htm.
  
• The Research Assessment Exercise (www.rae.ac.uk) rated SLS highly, awarding a grade of 4A. Grade 4 is defined as "Quality that equates to attainable levels of national excellence in virtually all of the research activity submitted, showing some signs of international excellence", and is subclassified as A because such a high percentage of staff were included in the report. In all 13 research active members of staff reported. SLS is the highest graded department in QMUC. The official RAE 2001 Panel Feedback Report made a number of positive comments about the Department's submission:
  1. of the outputs submitted, over one third were of international quality
  2. the number of doctorates awarded was above average for the UoA
  3. funding had increased over the assessment period
  4. this was a highly research-focused Department with excellent mechanisms to promote research
  5. there was extensive collaboration and ambitious goals.
  
  
• Speech & Language research is now a nationally recognised priority for the NHS in Scotland, following a successful application for "Priority and Needs" status for "A programme of research to find ways of helping people with little or no speech, or intractable speech disorders, to communicate". The application was led by Prof. Ivana Markova, Department of Psychology, University of Stirling and the Forth Valley Primary Care NHS Trust, in partnership with other NHS Trusts, Queen Margaret University College, University of Stirling and individual SLTs. Dr Sara Wood's clinical research in collaboration between QMUC and Forth Valley PC NHS Trust (funded by Gannochy Trust and Lloyds TSB) using EPG therapy was an important part of the bid.
  The programme aims to co-ordinate, promote and develop research to find more effective and efficient ways of helping people with intractable speech and language disorders and problems to communicate. It includes a wide range of health problems and disorders and crosses all age groups. It includes both high and low-tech research methods and use in practice with patients. There are opportunities to educate practitioners in research methodologies and practices either through working on funded projects or by undertaking recognised postgraduate training.
• A new ground-breaking book titled "Vowel Disorders" has appeared, edited by our very own Dr Fiona Gibbon, in collaboration with Martin Ball, an old friend of the department. This is the first major work devoted to vowel disorders. Four members of staff within the department have contributed to two chapters for the book (Fiona Gibbon, Janet Beck, Jocelynne Watson and Jim Scobbie). The book was launched at the American Speech and Hearing Association Annual Convention held in New Orleans in the US in December 2001. The Convention is the largest of its type in the world, with over 19,000 delegates including speech pathologists, audiologists and speech scientists. Raymond Kent, Professor of Communicative Disorders at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the US said of the book "This is a welcome addition to the literature on clinical phonetics and phonology. Not only does it remedy a serious deficiency in this field, but it also shows the kind of synergy that can be accomplished by drawing on the expertise of carefully selected authors. Readers from novice to specialist will gain much from this book."
  
  Other current research in the department on vowel segments includes Ben Matthews' longitudinal phonetic research into the acquisition of normal vowel systems for his 2001 PhD thesis, James M Scobbie's articulatory and phonological research into the Scottish Vowel Length rule, and Jocelynne Watson's work on vowel disorders.
  
  

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