We are thrilled to announce that the Ladder Lab team have been awarded major new research funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for just over £1 million. 

This provides the funding for our exciting new study “Understanding Reading Success”. This is a three year project to investigate the language and cognitive factors that predict successful reading progress for deaf and hearing children. The team is Dr Fiona Kyle, Dr Kate Rowley, Dr Katie Mason, Prof Ros Herman, Prof Nikki Botting and Prof Jan Frijters.   

This will allow us to follow up our existing cohort from the Preschool Language and Literacy project through to the end of primary school and map out their language and reading trajectories over the primary school years!   We will be following up these existing children as part of a new larger scale longitudinal study of reading and language development in middle childhood. For the new large study, we will be recruiting new hearing and deaf children, including more signers, aged 8-9 years.   

We’re very excited about the potential of this project as it will create a ground breaking dataset which will transform current knowledge about how children read and which language and cognitive factors are predictive of good reading progress.   Please see the Understanding Reading Success page for more details and how you can get involved!