Gillian West

University of Oxford | OX · The Department of Education

Purpose. Oral language skills provide a critical foundation for formal education and especially for the development of children’s literacy (reading and spelling) skills. It is therefore important for teachers to be able to assess children’s language skills directly, especially if they are concerned about their learning. Methods. We report the devel...

Oral language skills are critical for psychosocial development and children with language difficulties are more likely than peers to experience behavioral problems. This study investigated the effects of an oral language intervention on behavioral adjustment. We collected teacher ratings of behavioral adjustment for 1173 children taking part in a c...

Background There is now substantial evidence that language interventions delivered to small groups can be effective for improving language skills and hence strengthening the foundation for formal schooling. However, there are remaining challenges when delivering such interventions in naturalistic environments at scale. Method We reflect on three r...

Impaired procedural learning has been suggested as a possible cause of developmental dyslexia (DD) and developmental language disorder (DLD). We evaluate this theory by performing a series of meta-analyses on evidence from the six procedural learning tasks that have most commonly been used to test this theory: the serial reaction time, Hebb learnin...

Background: It is well established that oral language skills provide a critical foundation for formal education. This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) programme in ameliorating language difficulties in the first year of school when delivered at scale. Methods: We conducted a cluster randomized...

Oral language is crucial for social interaction and for learning in the classroom; it also provides the foundation for reading comprehension. It follows that children with language difficulties are at high risk of educational failure. Recently, a number of studies have demonstrated that it is possible to produce small but significant improvements i...

The procedural deficit hypothesis claims that impaired procedural learning is a causal risk factor for developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder. We investigated the relationships between measures of basic cognitive processes (declarative learning, procedural learning and attention) and measures of attainment (reading, grammar and...

It is now widely accepted that phonological language skills are a critical foundation for learning to read (decode). This longitudinal study investigated the predictive relationship between a range of key phonological language skills and early reading development in a sample of 191 children in their first year at school. The study also explored the...

The procedural deficit hypothesis claims that impaired procedural learning is at least partly responsible for the deficits in learning to read seen in children with developmental dyslexia. This study used a reading ability‐matched design to examine group differences in both procedural and declarative learning. Both children with dyslexia and typica...

West et al. (2018) examined the relationship between implicit learning and reading and language attainment in 7‐ to 8‐year‐old children. The implicit learning tasks had poor reliability and did not correlate with language or reading skills. These findings raise problems for the claim that Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Dyslexia are cause...

The procedural deficit hypothesis attributes developmental language deficits such as those found in developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder, at least in part, to impaired procedural learning. In order to test this hypothesis we investigated the relationships between measures of basic cognitive processes (declarative learning, pro...

Impaired procedural learning has been suggested as a possible cause of developmental language disorder and dyslexia (Nicolson & Fawcett, 2007; Ullman & Pierpont, 2005). However, studies investigating this hypothesis have so far delivered inconsistent results. These studies typically use extreme group designs, frequently with small sample sizes and...

Impaired procedural learning has been suggested as a possible cause of developmental dyslexia (DD) and specific language impairment (SLI). This study examined the relationship between measures of verbal and non-verbal implicit and explicit learning and measures of language, literacy and arithmetic attainment in a large sample of 7 to 8-year-old chi...

Over the last century, sporadic research has suggested that people whose hand, eye, foot, or ear dominances are not consistently right- or left-sided are at special risk of suffering academic difficulties. This phenomenon is known as crossed laterality. Although the bulk of this research dates from 1960’s and 1970’s, crossed laterality is becoming...

Over the last century, sporadic research has suggested that people whose hand, eye, foot, or ear dominances are not consistently right- or left-sided are at special risk of suffering academic difficulties. This phenomenon is known as crossed laterality. Although the bulk of this research dates from 1960’s and 1970’s, crossed laterality is becoming...