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| A speech assessment with a young Vietnamese boy, Ms Yen and Dr Ly Kha |
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| The structure of the rehabilitation department at CH1. Note speech therapy in the middle |
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| Ms Yen and Sharynne leaving CH1 via motorbike! |
Sharynne McLeod is Distinguished Professor of Speech and Language Acquisition at Charles Sturt University, Australia. This blog records the work of her team to support multilingual children's speech acquisition throughout the world. The associated Multilingual Children's Speech website contains resources for over 100 languages: http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech
May 19, 2011
Speech therapy for children in Việt Nam
Today I visited Children's Hospital Number 1 (CH1) in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). Ms Yen, the head of the rehabilitation department of the hospital, is also a student in the speech therapy course at Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine. Dr Ly Kha, the students’ linguistics lecturer also visited the hospital. While we were there, we met a young boy who was 3;11 years. He has been having speech therapy since he was 2 years and has a speech sound disorder. We assessed his speech and found that he had difficulty producing all four Vietnamese nasal consonants in word-initial position (he produced them as stops, ie denasalization). He also had difficulty producing the aspirated /t/, diphthongs/semi vowels and one of the Vietnamese tones (but this difficulty also was typical for adults in HCMC). His parents are very supportive of his speech therapy and wish him to succeed in school when he starts in 2 years’ time. We videoed the session, then discussed it in class with the speech therapy students.