I am so excited to welcome back Dr Audrey (Cen) Wang to work with me for 2 days/week as a statistician on our Catholic Education Tasmania research grant. Audrey has published so many important papers with our team. It will be wonderful to work with her again.
I enjoy my mentoring conversations. Today Prof Jillian Marsh and I discussed many interesting issues.
The following paper was accepted for publication today. The paper was based on collaborative work undertaken during my Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Professor Visiting Fellowship to University of Bristol, UK. Congratulations to Amy Davies who lead the paper.
Davies, A., Seifert, M., Southby, L., Harding, S., McLeod, S., & Wren, Y. (2026, in press August). It’s not just speech: Association between intelligibility, language and communication skills in children born with cleft palate +/- lip. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.
Here is the abstract
Purpose: Children born with cleft palate, with or without cleft lip (CP+/-L), are more likely to demonstrate problems with intelligibility. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between language and communication skills and intelligibility in 3-year-old children born with CP+/-L using questionnaire data from mothers of 674 children in a longitudinal prospective cohort study.
Method: A Kruskal-Wallis test was used to explore differences in intelligibility (Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS)) between categories of children’s language and communication skills (communication domain of the Ages and Stages-3 questionnaire (ASQ-3)). Associations were further explored using Tobit regression analyses adjusting for confounders cleft subtype, syndromic status, Robin sequence, biological sex, socio-economic status and child’s age.
Results: The Kruskal-Wallis test showed strong evidence (χ2(2) = 131.7, p < .001) to suggest a difference in average ICS score between the three ASQ-3 categories of further assessment needed, monitoring needed and on schedule. The fully adjusted model suggested children who were categorised as needing to be monitored would score 0.69 points lower on the average ICS score compared to their peers who were “on schedule” (β= -0.69; 95%CIs= -0.98, -0.41; p < .001). Average ICS score was estimated to reduce by approximately 1.14 points for children needing further assessment compared to children who were on schedule (β= -1.14; 95%CIs= -1.36, -0.92; p < .001).
Conclusions: Language and communication skills in children born with CP+/-L are associated with their intelligibility. Variability amongst individual children is likely. A multiple-risk model should be considered when planning interventions for children whose intelligibility is below expectations.
This afternoon, as part of our research grant with Catholic Education Tasmania, I spent 3.5 hours having 15 minute appointments with Tasmanian speech pathologists about kindergarten students attending CET schools who have learned English as another language. Felicity Laurence and I were impressed at how the speech pathologists had taken on board the information provided last year at the CET workshop and also our free online materials from the Multilingual Children's Speech website. This year, they had more evidence of incorporating knowledge about specific language's phonology into their reports and decision making. Congratulations colleagues.
Our data for the Catholic Education Tasmania Speech Sound Disorder (CeTasSSD) grant is coming in thick and fast - so now we are gearing up for statistical analysis. This morning I met with Dr Nicola Ivory to plan our work on the Intelligibility in Context Scale data.
CVC directors, Tamara, Kathy and I have been working hard on the next CVC newsletter so that it is ready for sharing at our CVC2026 conference next week. We have done SO MUCH since the last newsletter (Oct 2025).
The Children's Voices Conference (CVC2026) is a great place to be able to share the collaborative research we have been undertaking. Here are the papers I am involved in:
Everything is coming together for CVC2026.
Today Emma Hayes and I almost finished the CVC2026 conference proceedings and preparation of the documentation for Janelle Bateman to start uploading our conference presentations to the CSU YouTube channel. Thanks to Dr Carolyn Gregoric and Amy Whitfield for the preparation, subtitling, and quality control for all of the conference presentations.
Today I learned these interesting statistics from DVC-R about CSU's HDR (PhD, MPhil) students:
We have 1212 registrations from 63 countries:
Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Croatia, Denmark, Egypt, Fiji, Finland, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lesotho, Lithuania, Macao, Malawi, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, Türkiye, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam.
CVC2026 keynotes - what a lineup!
Hooray! Our Children's Voices Centre kitchen in The Treehouse is FINISHED. It has taken years of work. Thank you to the philanthropist who funded the building works, and Emma Hayes (CVC) and Blake (CSU) who oversaw the project.
Thank you to Prof Jason White for his update about the Australian Research Council's revised grant program
Listening to Children with Diverse Communication Abilities
Child Language Teaching and Therapy Special Issue (2026, volume 42) - Q1 journal
Guest editors: Sharynne McLeod and Holly McAlister*, Children’s Voices Centre, Charles Sturt University, Australia
CLTT Editors: Judy Clegg and Victoria Joffe
https://journals.sagepub.com/home/clt
The entire special issue contains 17 papers written by people from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand, UK
It has been great to mentor and include so many CVC staff/affiliates/adjuncts/HDR students in the special issue:
*bolded text = CVC affiliate/adjunct/HDR student
Our new kitchen is nearly finished. Thank you Emma Hayes for your oversight of this important project in the life of CVC.
Over the past 2 weeks we have been reviewing all submitted CVC2026 presentations, particularly checking them for ethical approvals and image source permission. We only have 7 more videos to review and 15 more to upload. The others are done.
A huge thank you to Carolyn, Amy, Emma and our CVC scientific review committee (esp. Arifa Rahman, Suzanne Hopf, Belinda Downey, Lindsay Smith, Jo Grimmond, Helen Blake, Katrina Gersbach, Sarah Bartlett, Kate Crowe, Holly McAlister, Kate Margetson, Alam Hossain, Kasey Garrison and Lysa Dealtry, Carolyn Gregoric, Sharynne McLeod)
It is such a joy to mentor our CVC affilates. Today over lunch Ros Cox and I constructed her book proposal on a napkin. This book is going to change the world and save children's lives. I can't wait to read it!
Today we had another meeting of the people involved in the analysis of the Children Draw Playing data focusing on the question that children answered: "How is play good for the world?"
We had a great conversation about authorship and finishing writing journal articles
Margetson, K., Tran, V. H., Blake, H. L., Verdon, S., Phạm, B., & McLeod, S. (2026). Speech and language of Vietnamese-English-speaking children and their families. In E. Babatsouli, Y. F. Holt, & K. N. Washington (Eds.), Linguistic varieties in North America: A guide for speech and language practitioners. (pp. 308-320) Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/BABATS2682
A wonderful collaboration based on our VietSpeech research. The best thing about this chapter is that all of the co-authors are my ex-PhD students :) How lovely to see ongoing collaborations between Kate, Van, Helen, Sarah and Ben
Tonight we had our 2-monthly meeting with Dr Mél Gréaux from the World Health Organization to advance the collaborative project with the Children's Voices Centre
AIM: To advance health equity for persons with disabilities by understanding the experience and perspectives of children with disabilities in the health sector
We are at the 18-month point of our 2-year project - so there are a lot of excellent results being discussed as we are finalising the presentations and publications from our research. We were pleased that Mél summarised the meeting with the sentence "As always, it's massively impressive". Thanks Mél - we really enjoy working with you too.
 |
| Sharynne McLeod, Mél Gréaux, Kate Freire, Carolyn Gregoric, Belinda Downey, Helen L. Blake |
