Mrs Caitlin Holme BA, MA
PhD Candidate
I completed my BA in Spanish and Linguistics at the University of Southampton in 2016, and then pursued my interest in both acquired and developmental language disorders through an MA in Clinical Linguistics from the University of Amsterdam, which I completed in 2017. As part of my Master’s degree I also completed an internship at the Speech and Language Therapy Department of the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile. During this time I was responsible for creation of a new discourse analysis assessment tool to assess the speech of Spanish-speaking patients with glioma and other traumatic brain injuries. In 2019/2020 I was a Research Associate on a national project funded by Public Health England to develop a new assessment tool to support early identification of children with speech, language and communication needs. As part of that project we evaluated the acceptability of the new tool for parents and practitioners via qualitative interviews and focus groups. In June 2020 I began a full-time PhD based at BSLTRU and the University of Bristol.
Current Research
My PhD research is focussed on children’s language development and parent-child interactions, drawing on my previous research experience in both linguistics and speech and language therapy. Parent-child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) is a technique commonly employed by speech and language therapists for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, there are concerns about the validity of PCIT for some families, given that the theory underpinning techniques as well as research into its effectiveness have mainly concentrated on white, middle-class families. Studies suggest that PCIT holds implicit cultural biases about linguistic interactions with children. This PhD study aims to gather evidence about a range of children’s daily language interactions and patterns of activities in their home environments. The ultimate goal will be to improve the evidence base about home language environments and make recommendations for SLTs to ensure interventions are appropriate and valid for families from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.