AUSTRALIAN
RESEARCH COUNCIL FUTURE FELLOWSHIP UPDATE
‘Speaking my
language: International speech acquisition in Australia’Written by Kim Woodland, Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education for the February 2012 RIPPLE Update
Sharynne has spent time
over the last few months continuing her Future Fellowship research,
collaborating on other research and publication projects, and working with
speech pathology students and the three doctoral students and two honours students she is supervising this year. She was recently interviewed
by ABC Science online for her
opinion on results from a new study that examined the ability of adults and
toddlers (aged 2 and 4) to change their vowel productions based on how they
perceived their own speech output. A range of media coverage has also resulted
from the completion of the ‘Infants’ lives in childcare’ project, funded by the
ARC, which a number of RIPPLE members were part of. Further information on the international interest
this project has garnered appears in the ‘Awards and Success Stories’ section
of this Update (p. 6). A project Sharynne is currently collecting data for is
‘Talking about talking: Children’s perspectives’, a project which explores
typically developing young children’s perspectives about their talking and
listening, with the aim of facilitating educational transition between early
childhood and school settings. She also recently gave an online
lecture—‘Cross-linguistic aspects of communication development’—which was
appropriately broadcast across 3 continents, in 5 different time zones, and in
2 languages (it was translated into Portuguese at one of the sites). Finally,
in the last RIPPLE Update, I wrote about a book that Sharynne was finalising
with Brian Goldstein. The book, Multilingual aspects of speech sound
disorders in children, has just been published by Multilingual
Matters in the United Kingdom. For more information, please visit Sharynne’s
blog: Speaking my languages.
