Dorothy Bishop is Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology and a Wellcome Principal Research Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology in Oxford and Adjunct Professor at The University of Western Australia, Perth. The primary aim of her research is to increase our understanding of why some children have specific language impairment (SLI), a condition diagnosed when the child has unusual difficulty in language acquisition, despite normal development in other areas. One difficulty for those studying SLI is that it is a heterogeneous disorder with ill-defined boundaries. A major goal of research is to refine our understanding of the different phenotypes that are included under the umbrella of SLI, and to clarify how SLI relates to other disorders in which communication is impaired, notably autism, specific reading disability, hearing impairment and Down syndrome.
