GRIDD research projects
Executive functions in deaf children
Funded by the ESRC, via a Centre Grant to the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre at UCL, January 2012 - December 2014.
Chloë Marshall (with Gary Morgan, City University London (Principal Investigator), Nicola Botting (City University London) and Tanya Denmark (UCL))
Executive functions are the cognitive processes that regulate, control and manage other cognitive processes. They include planning, working memory, attention, inhibition, idea generation, task switching, and monitoring of actions. This project studies how deafness and language learning experience (in both the sign and spoken modalities) impact on the development of executive functions. The aim of the project is to further elucidate the developmental relationship between language and related cognitive skills.
Evaluation of “Talk for Writing”
Funded by the Education Endowment Foundation, December 2012 - June 2014.
Chloë Marshall (with Julie Dockrell, IOE (Principal Investigator), and Dominic Wyse, IOE)
This project is evaluating a whole primary school intervention called “Talk for Writing”, which has been created by Pie Corbett. This evaluation uses a combination of quasi-experimental data collection from teachers and pupils, observation work and interviews with schools, and a rigorous evaluation of the project materials in relation to previously published peer reviewed studies.
Generating words: a behavioural and neuroimaging investigation of semantic processing in bimodal bilingual adults
Funded by the UCL/IOE Strategic Partnership Research Innovation Fund, August 2013 - April 2014.
Chloë Marshall (with Mairéad MacSweeney, UCL, and Eva Gutierrez, UCL)
A ‘semantic fluency task’ requires participants to produce as many words as they can from a specific category (e.g., animals) in a limited period of time. This task has a basic science function in that it indexes the organisation of words in an individual’s semantic network. The task also has an applied function, in the diagnosis of neurological disorders, and is being increasingly used in educational contexts. This project is investigating semantic fluency in a group who have not previously been investigated: hearing bimodal bilingual adults. These individuals were born to Deaf parents, from whom they learnt British Sign Language, and they also grew up learning the surrounding spoken language, English. This unique group of people allow us to investigate the impact of knowing a sign language on the organisation of the spoken lexicon. We are using the semantic fluency task to investigate semantic organisation at a behavioural level, in terms of the pattern and number of participants’ responses. We are also measuring hemispheric lateralisation during performance of the task using functional transcranial Doppler sonography.