Rate My Professor Neville Hennessey

Neville Hennessey is a Senior Lecturer in the Curtin School of Allied Health within the Faculty of Health Sciences at Curtin University. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology and teaches courses in both the speech pathology and psychology programs. Hennessey's research specializes in the development of speech production, speech perception, language, and cognition in typically developing children and children with speech, language, and communication needs. He investigates stuttering disorders, focusing on the relationships between speech motor abilities, linguistic skills, and self-regulation in individuals who stutter. Additional research interests include early development in children at risk of speech, language, or reading disorders and the role of executive functions in normal and disordered speech, language, and literacy development.

Hennessey is a member of the Language and Speech Sciences Group and the Cognition and Emotion Group in Health Sciences research at Curtin University. His projects include exploring the verbal trait deficit hypothesis in at-risk infants, the role of attention and cognitive demand in child and adolescent stuttering, and early features of heritable phenotypes associated with childhood apraxia of speech. He supervises PhD students on topics such as fluency and psychosocial sequelae in school-aged children who stutter. Key publications encompass 'Social anxiety and the severity and typography of stuttering in adolescents' (Mulcahy, Hennessey, Beilby, & Byrnes, 2008), 'Anxiety and speaking in people who stutter' (Hennessey, 2014), 'Semantic effects on word naming in children with developmental dyslexia' (Hennessey, Longstaff, Fang, & Jacobs, 2012), 'Early development in infants at risk of childhood apraxia of speech: A longitudinal investigation' (Highman, Hennessey, Leitão, & Piek, 2013), 'Improving Text-Independent Forced Alignment to Support Speech-Language Pathologists with Phonetic Transcription' (Li, Pham, Ward, Hennessey, & Tan, 2023), 'Chewing skills in two and three year old children: Gender differences and impact of chewing ability' (Porter, Cocks, Hennessey, & Smart, 2024), and 'Assessment of tongue structure and function in infants for the diagnosis of ankyloglossia: A systematic review' (Necus, Smart, Hennessey, et al., 2024). These works have advanced understanding of speech disorders and clinical assessment tools, with his publications cited over 680 times. He contributes to the Curtin Stuttering Clinic and related clinical research initiatives.