Nicola (Nicky) Dawson

I’m a Career Development Research Fellow in the department of Experimental Psychology, focusing on how language underpins academic attainment and emotional wellbeing. Alongside my fellowship at Oxford, I work as a Research Speech and Language Therapist at Moor House School & College in Surrey, where I collaborate with clinicians and teachers to develop interventions for children and adolescents with language disorders. Like others in the lab, I loved reading as a child, particularly books that involved mystery and adventure. My love of reading and interest in books made a degree in English Literature an obvious choice, and I completed this at Cardiff University in 2004. A subsequent stint as an au-pair in Paris looking after a trilingual 6-year old ignited a fascination with language development. I went on to train and work as a speech and language therapist, before moving into academia. My research to date has examined links between written language experience and reading and language development. In my PhD thesis, I investigated how knowledge about morphology (the structure of words) supports reading development in late childhood and adolescence. My subsequent postdoc work in the ReadOxford group focused on much younger children, and examined how experience with book language promotes literacy and oracy in the early years. You can read more about this research here. My Google Scholar page can be accessed here.