Morag Donaldson

Morag Donaldson is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, specializing in child language development and impairment. She actively teaches undergraduate courses in Developmental Psychology and Children with Language Impairments while supervising PhD research.

Her research centers on language development and impairment in children, with specific expertise in:

• Comprehension and production of explanations and causal expressions
• Word learning mechanisms in children with vocabulary difficulties

This work bridges developmental linguistics, clinical psycholinguistics, and speech-language pathology to advance understanding of typical and disordered language acquisition.

Analysis of her publications (2005-2009) reveals consistent focus on syntactic phenomena like verb-phrase anaphora and lexical development in clinical populations, demonstrating methodological rigor in spoken language tasks and causal expression analysis across developmental stages.

Donaldson supervises PhD student Diana Lopez lugo and has secured substantial research funding totaling £379,000 from major bodies including:

• Economic and Social Research Council (three grants)
• Medical Research Council
• Scottish Office departments

These projects address verb-phrase anaphora, phonological awareness, speech-language therapist roles, and Scottish Gaelic acquisition in children.