Catherine Renfrew

Catherine Renfrew

Catherine Renfrew trained as a speech therapist at the Glasgow School of Speech Therapy, qualifying in 1944. She was awarded a Fellowship of the College of Speech Therapists in 1950 resulting from her thesis on speech assessment. As a Fulbright Scholar she attended a post-graduate course at the State University of Iowa in 1955-6.

After working mainly with school children in Lancashire and Nottingham she was appointed Chief Speech Therapist to the United Oxford Hospitals in 1953. During 1964-6, with leave of absence, she taught speech pathology as Visiting Lecturer at the University of Toronto. After leaving her post in Oxford in 1973, she travelled widely, lecturing in all five continents.

While working with school children she began developing norm-referenced speech and language tests to find out whether children who experienced difficulty with spoken language development made more progress resulting from speech therapy than expected from maturation. The Articulation Attainment Test was first published in 1963, the Action Picture Test in 1966, the Word Finding Vocabulary Scale in 1968, and the Auditory Discrimination Test in 1973.