CVC Community Research - Thursday presentation

Today I was the CVC Community Research presenter at our weekly Thursday lunch session.

Multilingual Minds are Unlocking Global Knowledge, γνώση, 认识, إدراك, דַעַת, ज्ञान …
Distinguished Professor Sharynne McLeod Children’s Voices Centre, Charles Sturt University
There are over 7,000 languages in the world. Literature about children’s communication development focusses on English, northern hemisphere Indo-European languages (Draper et al., 2023; Kidd & Garcia, 2022), and “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies” (Henrich et al., 2010). This presentation will commend the work of multilingual minds (researchers, professionals, and translators) who provide English-language access to global knowledge about speech, language, and communication. It will outline the decade of work of the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, and knowledge contained within two global initiatives
The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-speech-development-in-languages-of-the-world-9780192868862) 
Multilingual Children’s Speech website (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acquisition/speech-acq-studies)
The presentation will conclude by challenging our reliance on English as the medium for knowledge dissemination and acknowledging the future potential of our connected multilingual world for greater understandings of speech, language, and communication.

Sharynne McLeod, PhD is a Distinguished Professor at Charles Sturt University, Australia specialising in multilingual children’s speech and language acquisition. She has a legacy of leading interdisciplinary teams, building world-class research capacity to undertake impactful international research. Her transformative research has reframed the speech-language pathology profession by foregrounding communication rights and social justice. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association has awarded her Honors and the Certificate of Recognition for Outstanding Contributions in International Achievement. She is a Life Member of Speech Pathology Australia, Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, and served as editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. The Australian Newspaper describes her as Australia’s Research Field Leader and Best in the World in Audiology, Speech and Language Pathology based on the “quality, volume and impact” of her research. 

19 people attended online and in person. Thanks for your encouragement and great discussion about the importance of home language maintenance and looking beyond English-language research.

CVC strategic and operational plan

 Today the Children's Voices Centre staff worked with the CSU Office of Strategy to develop our operational plan. Thanks to Marion Ware and Tiffany Thornton for leading the conversations.

School of Indigenous Australian Studies visits The Treehouse

 It was an honour to host a visit from the CSU School of Indigenous Australian Studies (SIAS) at The Treehouse yesterday. In 2025 we co-hosted Sami PhD student Camilla Porsanger from Nord University. We look forward to continued collaborations and connections.

 

Invited Presentation - Conference of the Italian Society of Phoniatrics and Speech Therapy

Dr Kate Margetson, Dr Helen Blake and I have been invited to present at the Conference of the Italian Society of Phoniatrics and Speech Therapy in March. We were invited to speak about our invited chapter that was published last year.

Margetson, K., McLeod, S., & Blake, H. L. (2025). Gli Speech Sound Disorders nei bambini plurilingue [Speech sound disorders in multilingual children]. In S. Piazzalunga, R. Salvadorini, N. Pizzorni, F. Todaro, & A. Schindler (Eds.). Speech sound disorders: Evidenze scientifiche e buone prassi riabilitative [Scientific evidence and best rehabilitative practices] (pp. 415-432). Erickson University & Research. https://www.erickson.it/it/speech-sound-disorders

 

Professor Antonio Schindler and Professor Silvia Piazzalunga wrote:

The afternoon of 5 March will be dedicated to the 'Official Report', the new book on SSDs. Due to time constraints, it will not be possible to discuss the entire book; therefore, as editors, we have identified eight topics that represent the different contents of the work. We would be honoured if you could present the topic of bilingualism.

Here is my presentation:

https://charlessturt.zoom.us/rec/share/Co96F2XtYqPmdSxWMxz3FOy7Ur7Oq_t2bbSZ5o0hqldaXxs22QPLlPAImhpDIIM.SbeW8JYKbMx7szSn

Translations of the ICS and SPAA-C

This week we have just uploaded a Nepalese translation of the Intelligibility in Context Scale https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments/ics to the Multilingual children's Speech website.

We also have been contacted by people across the world to translate the SPAA-C into Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) and the ICS into several Indian languages:

Assamese
Bengali
Bodo
Dogri
Kannada
Kashmiri
Konkani
Maithili
Malayalam
Manipuri
Marathi
Odia
Sanskrit
Telugu
Urdu

CVC has a printer!

The little things in life can drastically increase productivity and reduce expense. It has taken many many months - but this week the Children's Voices Centre has a printer/scanner. Hooray! No more walking to another building to find that the printer didn't connect - and no more paying hundreds of dollars for printing of our newsletters.

Happy lunar new year

Happy lunar new year!

• 新年快乐 Xīnnián kuàilè" (Putonghua/Mandarin)
• 恭喜发财 Gong hei fat choy (Cantonese)
• Chúc mừng năm mới (Vietnamese)
• 旧正月おめでとうございます (Kyūshōgatsu omedetō gozaimasu) (Japanese)
• ซินเจียยู่อี่ ซินนี่ฮวดไช้ Sin Jia Yoo Ee Sin Nee Huad Chai (Thai) 

Dr Audrey (Cen) Wang gave me some gifts to display in The Treehouse for lunar new year 2026 - the year of the horse. Thank you Audrey.

Welcome to The Treehouse Holly and Merlin

It was lovely to welcome my PhD student Holly McAlister and her dog Merlin to The Treehouse (CSU Bathurst) this week. While visiting, she and Wiebke Freese (visiting PhD scholar from University of Lubeck, Germany) spent time together looking through some of the speech tests I have gathered from across the globe).

Sharynne  McLeod, Holly McAlister, Wiebke Freese, Shukla Sikder

 

Global knowledge in 131 languages and dialects about children’s speech development, assessment, and intervention

 The following manuscript has been accepted for publication

McLeod, S. & Blake, H. L. (2026, in press February) Global knowledge in 131 languages and dialects about children’s speech development, assessment, and intervention. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics.

Here is the abstract

This paper exhorts communication specialists to look beyond English language knowledge by providing evidence to disrupt the unsubstantiated belief that there are few assessment and intervention resources for supporting multilingual children’s speech by. The Multilingual Children’s Speech website https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/home has curated 1,337 (mostly free) resources for supporting multilingual children’s speech acquisition, assessment, and intervention in 131 of the world’s languages and dialects (86 languages). Specifically, there are 658 speech acquisition studies in 55 languages, 423 speech assessment resources in 77 languages, and 178 speech intervention resources in 21 languages. This free website includes links to assessment tools, intervention manuals, journal articles, books, chapters, theses, and video recordings for 16 of the top 20 most spoken languages in the world and many minority languages, Indigenous languages (e.g., Māori, Samoan, Sesotho, Setswana, Warlpiri, isiXhosa, Zapotec, isiZulu) and languages and dialects impacted by colonization and slavery (e.g., African American English, Fiji English, Jamaican Creole, Tok Pisin). Only 17.95% of the resources are about English, with 51.68% about 39 other Indo-European languages, and 30.37% about 46 languages belonging to 15 non-Indo-European language families. Previous analyses of curated knowledge about children’s development in psychology and linguistics have found a WEIRD bias “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies”; however, only 29.07% of the languages included on the Multilingual Children’s Speech website are WEIRD. While only 1.23% of the 7000 world languages are represented on the website, these assessment and intervention resources will continue to grow due to ongoing work of multilingual communication specialists across the globe. 

Scoping review results presented at the meeting with the World Health Organization

Congratulations to Dr Kate Freire for leading the team who has been undertaking the scoping review for our project with the World Health Organization Disability team. Here are some of the results presented at our meeting with the WHO tonight 

Identification and Selection of Studies 

The search strategy identified 10,027 records for screening after duplicates had been removed and 361 records from NGO website searches and citation screening of included reports. Title and abstract screening resulted 9,082 records being excluded and the full texts of 1306 reports were subsequently obtained for review. Thus, 62 reports from 59 studies were included in the review. 

Characteristics of Studies 

The majority of the records (n = 54, 87%) were papers, with n = 8 (13%) theses. The majority of records n = 36 (61%) were from the later half of the review period (2011-2025). Twenty-one countries provided the healthcare settings for the children (United Kingdom n = 16, Canada n = 7, Brazil n = 5, Australia n = 4, Denmark n = 4, United States n = 4, Ireland n = 3, Türkiye n = 2, China n = 1, India n = 1, Iran n = 1, Israel n = 1, Mauritania n = 1, Norway n = 1, Pakistan n = 1, Portugal n = 1, Singapore n = 1, South Africa n = 1, South Korea n = 1, Spain n = 1, Sweden n = 1). In addition, one study included children from three countries: United States, Canada and Australia (Ahlawat et al., 2024).

Supporting young German children’s speech and language development

This week's weekly research presentation at the Children's Voices Centre

Children's Voices Centre community research lunch

Supporting young German children’s speech and language development
Wiebke Freese
University of Lübeck, Germany

Communication is the key to the world, and children are our future. However, some children need support in their communication development, for example because their speech and language is not developing as it should. This has an impact on children’s futures. This is where speech pathologists can help. They identify the exact causes and support the children with specific interventions. This requires knowledge of speech and language acquisition and specific tools that facilitate identification and differential diagnosis in order to support the right children with the right strategies.
Most of the knowledge about children’s speech and language development is available for English. Since development varies between languages, specific knowledge is also needed for languages other than English. This is where my project comes in: it aims to help gather data on German-speaking children in order to better support them in their development. In this presentation, I will outline the research we conducted with 445 children with and without speech sound disorders, aged two to six years. Using a longitudinal design, we assessed them in different ways (e.g., consistency, non-word repetition, stimulability) to better understand their development and to find tools to identify needs early.

20 CVC staff and affiliates attended from across Australia

Support from the DVC-R's office

The Children's Voices Centre is overseen by the Deputy Vice Chancellor-Research. We are very grateful for their support in many ways. Today, I met with Nilima Mathai to discuss our communications (e.g., newsletter) and administration support requirements. We currently have an advertisement to hire another senior administration officer too.

 

Collaboration activities between WHO and Charles Sturt University (2025-2026)

Collaboration activities between WHO and Charles Sturt University (2025-2026)
Views of children and young people with disabilities about health and the health system

The Children's Voices Centre staff and affiliates have had a number of meetings this week. We are so proud of our achievements from 2025 and look forward to finalising the work during 2026.

CVC-WHO team meeting - 10 Feb 2026

Scoping review team - lead by Dr Kate Freire - 9 Feb 2026

FEEDBACK FROM WHO 14 February 2026

Thank you very much - this is wonderful!! Congratulations again to the whole team for the impressive work achieved in just one year. It is truly inspiring and we couldn’t be more pleased with the breadth of your activities and the quality of your inputs bringing the voices of children with disabilities in this space.

 Objective of the collaboration (2025-2026)
•    “The collaboration between WHO and Charles Sturt University will contribute to WHO’s efforts in supporting Member States to implement the actions and recommendations from the [WHO Global report on health equity for persons with disabilities]. More specifically, the collaboration activities will help to collect the latest evidence to support Member States promote engagement of communities and other stakeholders (particularly with children and young people with disabilities).”
•    “The overarching aim of these activities will be to provide guidance to WHO on how they could support Member States better understand the views of children and young people with disabilities, and integrate them in health system planning.”
 

Research team
•    World Health Organization Disability Programme (Switzerland): Dr Mélanie Gréaux
•    Charles Sturt University, Children’s Voices Centre (Australia): Prof Sharynne McLeod, A/Prof Kathryn Crowe, A/Prof Suzanne C. Hopf, Prof Sarah Verdon, Prof Julian Grant, Dr Lysa Dealtry, Dr Belinda Downey, Dr Kate Freire, Dr Helen L. Blake, Dr Carolyn Gregoric, and Holly McAlister, A/Prof Kathy Cologon

Research activities
During 2025 research activities were undertaken “to build evidence on the experiences and perspectives of children and young people with disabilities on health and access to healthcare services”. 

Monthly progress meetings were held with WHO and CSU were held (typically Thursday 7pm-8pm Australian time).

Two main research activities were planned over the 2-year period (2025-2026)

Activity #1: A world-wide online qualitative study to explore children and young people with disabilities’ views about health and their experiences in health services. 
Activity #2: A scoping or systematic review on the experiences of children with disabilities in the health sector. 

 Presentations (World Health Organization/United Nations)
•    76th Session of the World Health Organization Regional Committee for the Western Pacific (RCM76) | Nadi, Fiji | October 2025 | Prof Sharynne McLeod, Dr Helen L. Blake, Holly McAlister https://speakingmylanguages.blogspot.com/2025/10/76th-session-of-world-health.html
•    Launch WHO Disability Health Equity Network Meeting | Geneva, Switzerland | 12-13 November, 2025 | Dr Mélanie Gréaux, Prof Sharynne McLeod https://speakingmylanguages.blogspot.com/2025/11/world-health-organization-disability.html
•    World Children's Day event at Charles Sturt University with  David Ohana, Chief Communications & Marketing Officer, United Nations Foundation https://unfoundation.org/who-we-are/our-people/david-ohana/ | 20th November, 2025| A/Prof Kathy Cologon, A/Prof Tamara Cumming https://alumni.csu.edu.au/news-and-events/events/industry/from-regional-roots-to-global-impact-kids-interview-un-changemaker-david-ohana 

Outputs
Report
•    Children draw health to advance health equity: Insights from children with disabilities (lay-person’s report) https://cdn.csu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/4506148/CVC-Children-draw-health-2025-Fiji-submission.pdf

Art exhibitions 
•    Children Draw Health Global Online Gallery https://www.csu.edu.au/research/childrens-voices-centre/research/childrens-health
•    Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) exhibition (November 2025-January 2026) https://bathurstart.com.au/exhibitions-events/cvc-children-draw-health/ (Opening Night Event: Friday 21 November – A/Prof Tamara Cumming guest speaker)

Research outputs
Journal article (submitted)
•    McLeod, S., Gregoric, C., Downey, B., Cumming, T., Cologon, K. & Gréaux, M. (2025, submitted October). Children’s perspectives about health and healthcare: A global arts-based study focusing on children with disabilities [Manuscript submitted for publication]. Charles Sturt University. 

CVC2026 themes

Today the CVC staff reviewed and decided on the themes for the Children's Voices Conference 2026 (CVC2026) and will update our CVC website to align with these.

1.    Children’s rights, voices, and perspectives
2.    Children’s inclusion
3.    Children’s communication 
4.    Children’s learning and activities 
5.    Children’s health and disability
6.    Children’s services workforce and policy

This discussion is very important in the journey of the Children's Voices Centre. Our original themes (listed below) were based on the research undertaken by the end of 2024 when we were building the website, and before we had hired staff and had affiliates join the centre.

2024 CVC themes (now superseded):

1. Children's voices
2. Children's speech language and communication needs
3. Multilingual children's speech
4. Early childhood education and workforce needs
5. Children's activities
6. Children's health 

Index for The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World

The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World has 80 chapters and is over 1500 pages. Most of the chapters are structured around a template to support comparisons across languages. Creating an index for the Handbook is a large task requiring attention to detail and a lot of pattern matching. I am so pleased that Wiebke Freese has worked with the template to create the index for chapters 6-80. Wiebke is visiting the Children's Voices Centre during February and is a PhD student at the University of Lubeck (Universität zu Lübeck), Germany. Her supervisor, Prof Annette Fox-Boyer co-authored the chapter on German speech development. Wiebke said she was surprised and impressed that there is so much research about children's speech across the world. Thanks Wiebke for supporting children's speech - you are a superstar!

Wiebke Freese working in The Beehive at CSU

Discussing the index with Dr Helen L. Blake and the CSU copyeditor Dr Mark Filmer

CLTT special issue

 Holly McAlister and I have been working on the Child Language Teaching and Therapy special issue for about a year now. On Friday we did a stocktake:

• 5 accepted
• 5 rejected
• 5 minor revisions (awaiting reviewers/authors)
• 5 major revisions (awaiting reviewers/authors)
• 1 awaiting review 

The papers are excellent! It is going to be a great special issue focusing on children's voices.

Children's Voices Cente - Whole of Centre Meeting - February 2026

Today was the first whole of centre meeting for the Children;s Voices Centre for 2026. It was exciting to welcome affilaites and HDR students to The Treehouse in Bathurst, and online.

We were pleased to welcome:

• CVC staff: Sharynne McLeod, Tamara Cummiong, Kathy Cologon, Carolyn Gregoric
• CVC affiliates: Helen L. Blake, Lucia Wuersch, Brendon Hyndman, Sarah Verdon, Libbey Murray, Joanne Grimmond, Hannah Greig, Jessica Sears, Lindsay Smith, Sabrina Syed, Katrina Gersbach, Sarah Stenson, Kate Margetson, Kate Freire, Cyrena Hunt-Madden, Leena Awawdeh, 
• HDR students: Gotham Roy, Arifa Rahman
• CVC visitors: Wiebke Freese from Lubeck University, Germany 

Topics included: 

1. Welcome to 2026: vision, mission, areas of focus
2. Children’s Voices Centre achievements in 2025: Establishment: Launch, The Treehouse; collaborations
3. Impact: World Health Organization; United Nations Foundation, Grants, publications, presentations
4. Children’s Voices Centre staff, adjuncts, affiliates, higher degree students, visitors, friends, 
5. Recruitment for new Senior Administration Officer: http://internal-jobs.csu.edu.au/ci/en/job/498693/senior-administration-officer 
6. CVC2026 conference: Chairs: A/Prof Kathy Cologon, Prof Sharynne McLeod, A/Prof Tamara Cumming; Secretary: Dr Carolyn Gregoric. Committees
7. CVC research community meeting: Every Thursday 12-1pm; Call for presenters; Competition to make up name; Call for sites in Albury, Dubbo, Orange, Wagga, Port Macquarie etc. 
8. Children Draw Play project
9. World Health Organization project: scoping review and children’s perspectives of health research
10. Website: Suggestions for updates and refining research areas
11. Notification of meeting to set CVC Workforce research agenda
12. Call for Newsletter Edition 2
13. CVC whole of centre meeting: bimonthly, first Thursday of month starting February 5
14. The Treehouse: Drop in and say hello on Wednesdays 12-1pm

 

Happy Sami day (6 February) and Camilla's report about her visit to CSU

Camilla Porsanger was a visiting PhD scholar at the Children's Voices Centre in 2025. Here is her report published by Nord University that has been published for Sami day 2026:

https://www.uv.uio.no/spedaims/aktuelt/aktuelle-saker/2026/urfolk-sprak-og-rettigheter.html

It begins: 

"– I år føles Samefolkets dag ekstra spesiell
Et forskningsopphold på den andre siden av kloden har gitt stipendiat Camilla Porsanger et tydeligere blikk på språk, identitet og rettigheter. – Å være på steder med så dyp kulturell og åndelig betydning for aboriginske urfolk gjorde sterkt inntrykk."

Translation

"– This year, Sami Day feels extra special
A research stay on the other side of the globe has given fellow Camilla Porsanger a clearer look at language, identity and rights. – Being in places with such deep cultural and spiritual significance for Aboriginal indigenous peoples made a strong impression."

Here are some photos from Camilla on Sami Day above the Arctic Circle in Norway

Catch up with Prof Yvonne Wren

 There are so many projects and areas of overlap with Prof Yvonne Wren from University of Bristol and Cardiff that we needed a 2026 catchup tonight. Topics included

• The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World (Yvonne co-authored the English English chapter and the Welsh chapter - and has colleagues who may be able to write chapters in the next edition of the book) 
• Two papers with Amy Davis about using the Intelligibility in Context Scale with the Cleft Collective Cohort
• MISLToe studies - now there are 3 manuals for replications in other countries and with other populations to consider: core outcomes, list of definitions, and diagnostic protocols.
• AMS grant with our colleagues from Brazil 

 

Children's Voices Conference (CVC2026)

Our Children's Voices Conference (CVC2026) launch page is live today. Thanks to Patrick McKenzie https://childrensvoicesconference.csu.domains/