Rotary eClub of Brindabella

Last night I spoke to members of the Rotary eClub of Brindabella at the invitation of president, Dr Travis Holland. (https://rotarye-clubofbrindabella.org.au/)

 Communication is a human right for ALL:
Let’s ensure we support children’s communication

Communication is a human right for all; including children with speech, language, and communication needs and those who speak/sign non-dominant languages (McLeod, 2018). Aligning with the Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989) the Charles Sturt University Children’s Voices Centre have given attention to the “voice” of children. We have creatively engaged in child-friendly methods to provide children with the “right to freedom of expression… regardless of frontiers” as outlined in Article 13. We have the power to support children’s voice and to assist others to listen. How can we support children’s participation within democratic processes in their families, schools, communities, and society?

Children’s Voices Centre  - https://www.csu.edu.au/research/childrens-voices-centre/home

Just published

van Doornik, A., Welbie, M., McLeod, S., Gerrits, E., & Terband, H. (2025). Speech and language therapists’ insights into severity of speech sound disorders in children for developing the speech sound disorder severity construct. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 60, e70022. https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.70022 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1460-6984.70022

Congratulations Anniek!

UN Youth forum at CSU

This morning I had the privilege of welcoming the UN Youth forum to Bathurst to speak with high school students across the region. I had the opportunity to engage with the 85 attendees registered from schools across the region, CSU communication and media staff and students, and the following people:

• Ms Satara Uthayakumaran, Australian Youth Representative to the United Nations 2025
• Mr Max Spencer-Tighe, Human Resources Director UN Youth
• Ms Jessica Luu, NSW President UN Youth
• Mr Benjamin Fry, Deputy Mayor of Bathurst
• Ms Kate Hook, Independent Candidate for the seat of Calare
• Ms Julie Cunningham, Labor Candidate for the seat of Calare

Review of children's perspectives of health and healthcare

This morning our team met with the CSU librarian Claudio Dionigi to plan our search strategy for our systematic/scoping review for our project invited by the WHO to consider children's perspectives of health and healthcare.

Sharynne  McLeod, Kate Freire, Kate Crowe, Claudio Dionigi, Suzanne Hopf, Cyrena Hunt-Madden

 

Preparing for our SACHL shortcourse

Today Kate Margetson and I met with the DLT team to discuss the development of our SACHL shortcourse. Nik Chalkaranje and Adam Lavelle were enthusiastic and helpful. 

Editorial board membership

It is my pleasure to be on the editorial board of the following journals:

• International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology [Q1]
• Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics [Q1]
• Child Language Teaching and Therapy [Q1]
• Speech, Language and Hearing [Q1]
• Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech [Q2]
• Advances in Communication and Swallowing

In 2025 I am co-editing a special issue of Child Language Teaching and Therapy and have been invited to be co-editor of some special issues in the future.

Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia - Panel D Fellowship Committee meeting

Today was my first meeting on the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) - Panel D Fellowship Committee meeting. We considered carefully the impressive contributions of the nominees to become Fellows of ASSA. What a privilege to spend time with esteemed colleagues discussing the research of notable Australians.

Honorary Doctorate from the University of Patras, Greece

Today I received the following invitation to accept an invitation to be awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Patras, Greece. What an honour!

We would like to take the opportunity of the ICPLA 2025 conference in Patras to invite you to be awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Department of Speech and Language Therapy at the University of Patras.

Your contributions to the field of Speech and Language Therapy have been truly significant, and we believe this recognition would be a meaningful way to acknowledge your work. It would be an honor for us to welcome you to Patras and celebrate this occasion together. This would also be a great opportunity to highlight the exceptional work being done at our university in the field of Speech and Language Therapy, showcasing the dedication and progress being made within the department.

Here is a link about a previous recipient of this prestigous honour, Prof. Lucia Banci:  https://www.cerm.unifi.it/news/all-news/305-honorary-doctorate-awarded-to-prof-lucia-banci-by-the-university-of-patras

Multilingual Aspects of Children's Speech Sounds (2nd edition)

Today Helen, Kate and I met to keep working on our book "Multilingual Aspects of Children's Speech Sounds (2nd edition)". We have received 21 chapters - and they are great. The rest are on their way. We are ahead of schedule.

Congratulations Lucia

It has been a privilege to mentor and support Dr Lucia Wursch in the submission of her grant to the Australian Research Council which was submitted yesterday. We had a chance to celebrate at the Vice Chancellor's morning tea this morning. Congratulations Lucia and best wishes for a successful outcome.

CSU/ Nord early childhood collaboration

This evening we had another meeting regarding the CSU/ Nord EC collaboration. The great news is that the Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between the two universities.
We have three streams of interest relating to early childhood and discussed collapsing the final two groups:

• Children voices - Coordinator - Elisabeth Bjørnestad (Nord)
• Online learning for ECE ITE and MEd - Coordinators-Leanne Gibbs (CSU) and Martin Per Samuelsson (Nord)
• Quality assurance, regulation and qualifications - Coordinator-Kelly Tribolet (CSU)

The breakout group for the Children's Voices group were invited to share the work they are doing. Professor Karl Victor Magne Johansson described their children's voices research undertaken with five different early childhood centres listening to stories children are telling in different settings in order to create drafts for picture books. The picture books are translated into the Sami language. The images for the picture books have been drawn or photographed by the children or have used the children's words to create AI images. What a fascinating project.

Children Draw Playing - data analysis team

Meeting 2 with enthusiastic colleagues from the Children's Voices Centre - competently led by Dr Carolyn Gregoric

 

CVC finances

This week I have been so pleased to meet with Gil Burmeister and Michael Woolnough who are finance officers at CSU. Michael will be able to provide support for the Children's Voices Centre (CVC) finances. I am grateful for his oversight of our budget.

 

Book chapter accepted

 This morning we learned that the following book chapter has been accepted for publication

Margetson, K., Tran, V. H., Blake, H. L., Verdon, S., Phạm, B., & McLeod, S., (2025, in press March). Speech and language of Vietnamese-English-speaking children and their families. In Y. Holt, K. N. Washington, & E. Babatsouli (Eds.) Linguistic varieties in North America: A primer for speech and language practitioners. Multilingual Matters.

Congratulations team!

Planning our speech pathology screening clinic for Indigenous families

This morning our research team met at the Orange Community Health Centre to plan our speech screening days in April that will be part of our research with Indigenous children. What an informative and useful planning session.

Sharynne, Susan Smith, Sarah Bartlett, Katrina, Emily-Jane Woodhead

Accepted - Parent-reported speech and language in early childhood is an early indicator of Indigenous Australian children’s literacy and numeracy outcomes

The following paper has been accepted for publication:

McLeod, S., Harrison, L. J., McMahon, C., Wang, C., & Evans, J. R. (2025, in press March 2025). Parent-reported speech and language in early childhood is an early indicator of Indigenous Australian children’s literacy and numeracy outcomes. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.

Here is a short summary:

This longitudinal study of 1,534 Indigenous Australian children demonstrated that parent report of speech and language concern in early childhood is an important early indicator of education outcomes at school. Families are important knowledge holders throughout a child’s trajectory of learning and development.

Here is the abstract

Purpose: To longitudinally investigate parent-reported children’s speech and language in early childhood as an early indicator of Indigenous Australians’ school-age educational outcomes.
Method: Participants were 1,534 children from the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children (LSIC) whose parents reported on expressive and receptive speech and language concern (SLC) at 3–5 years using the Parents’ Evaluation of Developmental Status (PEDS). A total of 467 children (30.4%) were identified as having SLC, of whom 308 had only expressive SLC, 65 had only receptive SLC, and 81 had both expressive and receptive SLC. Educational outcomes included (a) National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests (grade 3; 8–9 years), (b) teacher-reported literacy and numeracy on the Academic Rating Scale (ARS) (8–9, 9–10 years), (c) research officer-administered Progressive Achievement Tests (PAT)-Reading (6–7, 7–8, 8–9, 9–10 years) and PAT-Maths (8–9, 9–10 years).
Results: After controlling for covariates (child age, sex, having hearing problems, having a disability, speaking an Indigenous language, parent education, family life events, community socio-economic status, and remoteness), SLC was associated with significantly lower scores on all NAPLAN subtests (reading, writing, spelling, grammar, numeracy); teacher-rated ARS: Language and Literacy (9–10 years); and PAT: Reading (6–7 years) and Maths (9–10 years). Sub-group comparisons indicated that children with both expressive and receptive SLC had the poorest outcomes on NAPLAN and ARS subtests.
Conclusion: Parental reporting of Indigenous Australian children’s speech and language concern in early childhood is an important early indicator of education outcomes at school, indicating the importance of families throughout a child’s trajectory of learning and development.

OUAT - publication preparation

Our Once Upon a Time grant data collection is finished - and today we met to continue working on the data analysis, publications and presentations from this important work.

Sharynne, Jane McCormack, Anna Cronin

Hooray! Ethics approval

We were very pleased to receive approval from the CSU Human Research Ethics Committee today for our research with Catholic Education Tasmania. Now we can begin. Hooray!

Accepted journal article - Methods of Diagnosing Speech Sound Disorders in Multilingual Children

Our manuscript titled "Methods of Diagnosing Speech Sound Disorders in Multilingual Children" has just been accepted for publication in the "Changemaker" Special Forum for the Q1 journal Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. It came about because our session at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association convention in 2024 was one of the few that was awarded "changemaker" status - so we were invited to write up our submission. Thanks to Karla and Kate for leading this important paper. Here is the reference and abstract:

Washington, K. N., Crowe, K., McLeod, S., Margetson, K., Bazzocchi, N. B. M., Kokotek, L. E., van der Straten Waillet, P., Másdóttir, T., & Volhardt M. D. S., (2025, in press). Methods of diagnosing speech sound disorders in multilingual children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.

Purpose: Identification of speech sound disorder (SSD) in children who are multilingual is challenging for many speech-language pathologists (SLPs). This may be due to a lack of clinical resources to accurately identify SSD in multilingual children as easily as for monolingual children. The purpose of this paper is to describe features of multilingual speech acquisition, identify evidence-based resources for the differential diagnosis of SSD in speakers of under-studied language paradigms, and to demonstrate how culturally responsive practices can be achieved in different linguistic contexts.
Method: Examples of different approaches used to inform accurate diagnosis of SSD in 2- to 8-year-old multilingual children are described. The approaches used included: (a) considering adult speech models, (b) completing validation studies, and (c) streamlining evidence-informed techniques. These methods were applied across four different language paradigms in countries within the Global North and Global South (e.g., Jamaican Creole-English, Jamaica; Vietnamese-English, Australia; French and additional languages, Belgium; Icelandic-Polish, Iceland). The culturally responsive nature of approaches in each cultural/linguistic setting is highlighted as well as the broader applicability of these approaches.
Results: Findings related to dialect specific features, successful validation of tools to describe functional speech intelligibility and production accuracy, and the utility of different techniques applied in the diagnosis of SSD are outlined.
Conclusions: Culturally responsive methods offer a useful framework for guiding SLPs’ diagnostic practices. However, successful application of these practices is best operationalized at a local level in response to the linguistic, cultural, and geographic context.

Editing a new book

Our editorial team met again today to discuss the publishers' response to our submission. We have a good plan.