Multilingual Australia

Australia is a very multilingual society. Of the languages other than English reported to be used at home, the most dominant languages are Italian (10.4%), Greek (8.0%), Cantonese (7.8%), Arabic (7.7%) and Mandarin (7.0%) (Australia Bureau of Statistics, 2006). In order the most frequent languages spoken are:

• Italian
• Greek 
• Cantonese
• Arabic
• Mandarin
• Vietnamese
• Spanish
• German
• Hindi
• Macedonian
• Croatian
• Australian Indigenous languages
• Korean 
• Turkish
• Polish
• Tagalog
• Serbian
• French
• Indonesian
• Filipino
• Maltese
• Russian
• Dutch
• Other Chinese languages
• Japanese
• Tamil
• Sinhalese
• Samoan
• Portuguese
• Khmer
• Persian
• Hungarian
• Dari 
• Other Iranic languages
• Other languages

Amazing Australia

As part of my Future Fellowship I have travelled to different places in Australia. Here are a few photos to show our amazing country.

Speech Pathology Australia National Tour

Speech Pathology Australia National Tour:
Working With Children From Multilingual Backgrounds
Presented by Associate Professor Cori Williams

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the Speech Pathology Australia (SPA) National Tour presented by Cori Williams. It was wonderful to listen and learn from Cori and to discuss these important issues with other SLPs including Kate Crowe, my PhD student who also went to Canberra for the day. A number of SLPs from Canberra work with children of diplomats, so conducting intervention in these children's home languages is very important for when they return to their home countries.

Cori and I have designed a questionnaire that is being given to each of the participants in the SPA National Tour workshops to find out about Australian SLPs' beliefs and practices about working with children from multilingual backgrounds. Cori has now finished two of her eight presentations, so we look forward to analysing the data when she is finished.

Associate Professor Cori Williams and Professor Sharynne McLeod
thinking about multilingual speech in Canberra

HCSNet Workshop: Advances in Speech Production

This week I attended the HCSNet Workshop: Advances in Speech Production: Tools, Techniques and Recent Research at University of Western Sydney, Milperra.
There were many distinguished speakers:

• Christian Kroos (MARCS Labs, UWS) Making speech production transparent: The AHAA and Face & Voice laboratories at MARCS
• Douglas Whalen (Haskins Laboratories, U.S.A.). Ultrasound investigation of speech articulation dynamics
• Mark Tiede (Haskins Labs & MIT, U.S.A.). Uses and abuses of ElectroMagnetic Articulometry (EMA)
• Andy Butcher (Flinders U) Electropalatography (EPG): Tracking the spatio-temporal patterns of tongue-palate contact.
• Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson (U British Columbia, Canada). Time to re-think temporal control of communicative behavior
• Roland Goecke (U Canberra). Tracking faces without artificial markers

I co-presented 2 papers:

• Adaptation to the electropalatograph (EPG) palate: Consonant acoustics, listener perceptions, and speaker rating (Sharynne McLeod and Jeff Searl)
• Combining ultrasound and electropalatography (EPG) for research into speech production (Sharynne McLeod and Alan Wrench)

CSU speech pathology graduation

On Thursday I went to Charles Sturt University in Albury to celebrate the graduation of:

• Bethany Toohill who graduated with BHlthSc(Sp Path)(Hons) and was supervised by Jane McCormack and myself
• Anna O'Callaghan who graduated with a PhD and was the first CSU undergraduate speech pathology student to graduate with a PhD
• Michelle Smith-Tamaray who also graduated with a PhD. Michelle and Anna were the CSU speech pathology course's first PhD graduates.
• The last cohort of CSU speech pathology undergraduate students that I taught (when they were in year 2).

It was a very special day to celebrate these achievements and to hear about what they are all doing now.

Sharynne McLeod, Bethany Toohill and Jane McCormack:
Proud supervisors celebrating Bethany's graduation.

Big ASC: Big Australian Speech Corpus

Over the past 2 days I have been in Sydney to work with Australia's best linguists and phoneticians to develop protocols for the Big ASC: Big Australian Speech Corpus. The aim of the project is to collect high quality audio and video recordings of Australian adults' speech from across the country. The data will be loaded into the Australian National Corpus for people across the world to use in their research.
Future funding applications may enable the development of the Little ASC of Australian children.

Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children

My latest book officially began today. Within 12 hours of inviting authors over a third have said yes! I am looking forward to working with Brian on this exciting project:

Title: Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children
Editors: Sharynne McLeod and Brian A. Goldstein
Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Synopsis: Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children aims to translate research into clinical practice for speech-language pathologists working with multilingual children with speech sound disorders. The book explores both multilingual and multicultural aspects of children with speech sound disorders. It is divided into three sections: I. Foundations, II. Multilingual speech acquisition, III. Speech-language pathology practice.
An introductory chapter will discuss general characteristics. Subsequent chapters will address speech acquisition, how the disorder manifests in different languages, cultural contexts, and speakers, and addresses diagnosis, assessment and intervention.

A unique feature of this book is the translation of research into clinical practice. There will be 14 research chapters that primarily focus on an identified topic and describe available research across a wide range of languages. These will be supplemented by application/translation chapters that translate research into practice providing vignettes for specific geographical or linguistic contexts.

By including these two different styles of chapters authors will be drawn from across the globe to provide exemplars of the multitude of issues when working with multilingual children with speech sound disorders.