Research interests

I'm interested in ...

the sounds of language, from sociophonetics to suprasegmentals
accents and articulation
impairments of phonology
literacy, because we couldn't do linguistics without it

My research so far has had a particular focus on the acquisition of phonology in populations showing different developmental trajectories. I'm interested in the various strands of phonology-related skills which somehow combine to make up an individual's "phonological knowledge", and how different profiles of strengths and weaknesses give rise to different developmental outcomes.

Recent activity

• The 'Talking Nonsense' Project (designing and piloting phonologically balanced nonwords)
  
• The EMA Project (Electromagnetic Articulography) with Alice Turk, Christian Geng, Jim Scobbie
• The VOYS Project (Voices of Young Scots) with Felix Schaeffler, Christoph Draxler, and Klaus Jänsch
• Lexical Effects in Children's Speech Perception, with Mits Ota and Mary Stewart
  
• The Hotdog Project (info for parents)
• JAST and AMI
  

About my thesis

I graduated in 2009 from Edinburgh University, where my PhD was supervised by Dr Mits Ota, with Dr Ann Clark (Queen Margaret University) as external supervisor. My thesis title was: Exploring the Nature of the Phonological Deficit in Dyslexia: Are Phonological Representations Impaired?

I developed a fresh method for testing people's implicit knowledge of the sound patterns of language, as distinct from the aspects of spoken language which overlap with knowledge of written language. No evidence was found that adults with dyslexia have an impairment relative to non-dyslexic peers in their implicit knowledge of the phonological patterns of spoken language.

Publications

• Dickie, C, Ota, M, & Clark, A (forthcoming). 'Revisiting the phonological deficit in dyslexia: Are implicit non-orthographic representations impaired?' To appear in Applied Psycholinguistics. (Manuscript)
  
• Dickie, C (2009). ‘Prosody and literacy: the relationship between children’s suprasegmental representations and reading skills.’ International Clinical Linguistics Conference (ICLC), Madrid, September 2009 (Paper). To appear in V Marrero & I Pineda (eds), Linguistics: The Challenge of Clinical Application.
  
• Dickie, C, Ota, M, & Clark, A (2007). 'The phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia: is there a suprasegmental component?' (Paper presented at ICPhS 2007) (Paper)

Presentations

• Dickie, C (2011). 'Rebelling greenhouses: The invisible relationship between morphophonology and literacy.' Invited talk. Dutch-British Workshop on Morphophonology in Language and Literacy. Amsterdam, January 2011 (Abstract) (Slides)
  
• Dickie, C, Ota, M, & Clark, A (2010). 'Phonologically balanced nonwords.' Child Language Seminar, London, June 2010 (Abstract) (PowerPoint slides)
• Dickie, C, Draxler, C, Schaeffler, F, & Jänsch, K (2010). 'Updating the Scottish accent map: preliminary formant data from the VOYS corpus.' British Association of Academic Phoneticians colloquium (BAAP), London, March 2010 (Abstract) (PowerPoint slides)
  
• Ota, M, Dickie, C, Hien, C, & Stewart, ME (2010). ‘Autistic traits and lexical effects on speech perception in children.’ British Association of Clinical Linguistics (BACL) Symposium, Edinburgh, January 2010
  
• Dickie, C, Schaeffler, F, Draxler, C, & Jänsch, K (2009). ‘Speech recordings via the internet: An overview of the VOYS project in Scotland.’ Interspeech, Brighton, September 2009 (Paper)
  
• Dickie, C., Clark, A., Ota, M., Nasir, J., O’Hare, A., & Watson, J. (2008). 'Nonword repetition in children with SLI and their parents: Looking for phonological similarities' (Talk presented at BACL, Reading 2008) (Slides)
• Dickie, CE, Clark, A, & Ota, M (2008). 'The role of phonological representations in dyslexia' (Talk presented at the DGfS Workshop on the role of phonology in reading acquisition, Bamberg 2008) (Slides)
• Dickie, CE, Clark, A, & Ota, M (2007). 'Does the phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia extend beyond the segmental level?' (Talk presented at SPiAP, Reading, 2007) (Slides)
• 'Phonology without orthography' (presented at the LEL Postgrad Conference 2006) (Paper)

Teaching

I have tutored and/or lectured for undergraduate courses at all levels:

• first year Linguistics (introduction to all areas of linguistics) 
• second year Linguistics (phonology and instrumental phonetics)
• introductory syntax and semantics for QM Speech and Language Therapy BSc students
• QM Honours Speech and Language Therapy Applications of Linguistics 

I have tutored primary and high school students in English (including Standard Grade and Higher) and have given interactive presentations on phonetics to pupils at local secondary schools.