Nicola Dawson
Research Speech and Language Therapist
Specialist topics: Developmental Language Disorder; Speech & Language Research; Literacy interventions; Literacy and links to mental health
Nicky works within the team to support and develop research on interventions for children and young people with DLD. She splits her time at the Institute with her role as Research Associate in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, where she is working on a number of projects relating to children’s language and literacy development.
Nicky qualified as a speech and language therapist in 2010 and worked in mainstream schools for 3 years with a varied caseload. She subsequently worked as a research assistant on a longitudinal project examining the relationship between reading and vocabulary in adolescents. She completed her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2019, and joined the University of Oxford as a postdoctoral researcher.
Nicky’s research interests include morphology and the links between language and areas such as literacy and mental health, and she is looking forward to working with the team to develop evidence-based interventions to support children with DLD in these areas.
To arrange an interview with any member of our team, please contact James Skitt, Marketing & Communications Officer on 01883 719021 or use our contact form.
Burridge, D., Hughes, L., Titterington, J., Dawson, N., & Ebbels, S. (2024). Daily living skills in adolescents with and without language disorder, measured using the WHEEL OF INDEPENDENCE TM framework. British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 03080226241280732. https://doi.org/10.1177/03080226241280732
Dawson, N., Hsiao, Y., Tan, A. W. M., Banerji, N., &
Nation, K. (2021). Features of lexical richness in children’s books:
Comparisons with child-directed speech. Language Development Research. https://doi.org/10.34842/5we1-yk94
Dawson, N., Hsiao, Y., Tan, A. W. M., Banerji, N., &
Nation, K. (2023). Effects of Target Age and Genre on Morphological Complexity
in Children’s Reading Material. Scientific Studies of Reading,
1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2023.2206574
Dawson, N., Rastle, K., & Ricketts, J. (2018).
Morphological effects in visual word recognition: Children, adolescents, and
adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and
Cognition, 44(4). https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000485
Dawson, N., Rastle, K., & Ricketts, J. (2021a). Bridging
form and meaning: Support from derivational suffixes in word learning. Journal
of Research in Reading, 44(1), 27–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12338
Dawson, N., Rastle, K., & Ricketts, J. (2021b). Finding
the man amongst many: A developmental perspective on mechanisms of
morphological decomposition. Cognition, 211(January),
1–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104605
Dawson, N., & Ricketts, J. (2017). The Role of Semantic
Knowledge in Learning to Read Exception Words. In Perspectives of the
ASHA Special Interest Groups SIG 1 (Vol. 2, Issue 2).
Dong, Y., Hsiao, Y., Dawson, N., Banerji, N., & Nation,
K. (2024). The Emotional Content of Children’s Writing: A Data‐Driven
Approach. Cognitive Science, 48(e13423),
1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13423
Ebbels, S., Gadd, M., Nicoll, H., Hughes, L., Dawson, N.,
Burke, C., Calder, S. D., & Frizelle, P. (2024). The Effectiveness of
Individualized Morphosyntactic Target Identification and Explicit Intervention
Using the SHAPE CODING System for Children With Developmental Language Disorder
and the Impact of Within-Session Dosage. Language, Speech, and Hearing
Services in Schools, 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_LSHSS-23-00098
Glisson, L., Tutty, R., Heine, C., Burke, C., Hughes, L.,
Dawson, N., & Ebbels, S. (2025). Morphemes matter: A small scale randomised
control trial of vocabulary intervention focusing on affixes for adolescents
with (developmental) language disorder. International Journal of
Speech-Language Pathology, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2025.2526539
Hsiao, Y., Dawson, N. J., Banerji, N., & Nation, K.
(2022). The nature and frequency of relative clauses in the language children
hear and the language children read: A developmental cross-corpus analysis of
English complex grammar. Journal of Child Language, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000921000957
Hsiao, Y., Dawson, N. J., Banerji, N., & Nation, K.
(2024). A corpus-based developmental investigation of linguistic complexity in
children’s writing. Applied Corpus Linguistics, 100084. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2024.100084
Nation, K., Dawson, N., & Hsiao, Y. (2022). ‘Book
language’ and its implications for children’s language, literacy, and
development. Current Directions in Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214221103264
Ricketts, J., Dawson, N., & Davies, R. (2021). The
hidden depths of new word knowledge: Using graded measures of orthographic and
semantic learning to measure vocabulary acquisition. Learning and
Instruction, 74(February). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2021.101468
Ricketts, J., Lervåg, A., Dawson, N., Taylor, L. A., &
Hulme, C. (2020). Reading and Oral Vocabulary Development in Early
Adolescence. Scientific Studies of Reading, 24(5). https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2019.1689244
