Heather van der Lely and developmental language disorders: Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

This special issue honours the work and memory of Heather van der Lely, who died of cancer on 17 February 2014, at the too-young age of 58. Heather pioneered the study of children with Grammatical-Specific Language Impairment using a range of innovative behavioural and neuroimaging methods, and became one of the best-known researchers in the field of developmental language disorders. When Heather left school at 16 with few qualifications, her severe dyslexia was still unrecognised. She was apparently told that she was only capable of working at a children’s day nursery near her home village in Herefordshire, UK. However, she had a genuine interest in children and their development, and within two years she was running the nursery. She then applied to train as a nursery nurse, which meant first going to night school to get A-levels. By the time she passed her A-levels, she had decided to become a speech and language therapist, which, of course, required a degree. She graduated from Birmingham City University three years later, with First Class honours. She worked as a speech and language therapist for two years before being accepted by the Department of Psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London, to study for a PhD. Her topic was sentence comprehension in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). In 1990, as she was completing her PhD, she was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour. Given only months to live, she gave up work to enjoy what little time she had left. Thankfully, the tumour was misdiagnosed. A year later she was back at Birkbeck, in receipt of a post-doctoral fellowship from the British Academy which enabled her to continue studying the underlying nature and cause of SLI in children. A career-development fellowship from the Wellcome Trust followed. In 2001, she was offered the new