Dr Carol-Anne Murphy

Carol-Anne Murphy is a lecturer in speech and language therapy in the School of Allied Health, Faculty of Education and Health Sciences at University of Limerick, (UL). She leads the child speech, language and communication needs research group within the school of allied health. The group are particularly interested in inter-professional collaborations and partnership between health and education to support children in schools and to develop ecologically valid primary, secondary and tertiary level preventative interventions (alternatively referred to as universal, targeted and specialist levels of service delivery in the education setting).  Carol-Anne has a particular interest in understanding mechanisms of intervention, effective approaches to assessment, and intervention implementation in developmental communication difficulties particularly developmental language disorder (DLD). She was a member of Catalise, an international consortium, which developed consensus on identification of and terminology for developmental language disorder and co-authored an IASLT position statement on DLD in 2017. She has been involved as PI or collaborator in successful grant applications including a Health Research Board Fellowship to complete doctoral studies on Profiles of Sentence Production in children with Specific Language Impairment (2013) and an EU COST Action, IS1406 (2015-2019), ‘Enhancing children's oral language skills across Europe and beyond-a collaboration focusing on interventions for children with difficulties learning their first language”. She is Vice-chair of Working Group one of the COST action who are addressing theoretical underpinnings of intervention and has just co-edited a book (publisher Routledge), which maps theory, practice and service delivery in child language intervention across Europe, and reflects services in individual countries.