Want to research speech pathology in Australia? CSU is the place

Charles Sturt University recently has written an article titled "Want to research speech pathology in Australia? CSU is the place" and has promoted it via social media. I was not aware of them writing it, but it is a great summary of our work, and encourages new students to come and work with our team: https://insight.futurestudents.csu.edu.au/want-to-research-speech-pathology-in-australia-csu-is-the-place. I look forward to hearing from passionate, hardworking students who wish to join us. 

Congratulations Natalie on your PhD submission

Today Natalie Hegarty submitted her PhD at Ulster University in Northern Ireland. Her thesis was titled: "Supporting speech and language therapists' application of evidence-based practice in the management of phonological speech sound disorders". Congratulations Natalie!
I have been fortunate to be on Natalie's supervisory team with Dr Jill Titterington and Laurence Taggart from Ulster University. Her viva will be held in March.

Natalie Hegarty (image from Twitter @UlsterUniPhD)

Here is the abstract:

Background: Speech and language therapists (SLTs) often use two elements of evidence-based practice in their management of children with phonological impairment (i.e., internal clinical data and child/parent preferences integrated through SLTs’ experiences), but do not regularly use the third element: research evidence. Indeed, SLTs often use long-standing approaches with developmental target selection criteria (e.g. conventional minimal pairs) despite some research suggesting that interventions with more complex target selection criteria (e.g. the complexity approaches or multiple oppositions) may provide greater system-wide change. Moreover, recent research has found that SLTs’ intervention intensity provision is lower than provision in the literature. Narrowing this research-practice gap is necessary to achieve evidence-based practice.
Aim: To support SLTs’ use of evidence-based practice in the clinical management of children with phonological impairment.
Methods: This thesis used an explanatory sequential mixed methods design. There were five stages: (1) systematic review; (2) online survey; (3) focus groups and interviews; (4) resource co-production workshops and; (5) face validity exploration. This thesis was guided by the Medical Research Council, the Knowledge to Action framework and the Intervention Mapping framework, including the use of logic modelling and the socio-ecological model.
Findings: Using information gathered throughout this thesis and through co-production with SLTs, this work resulted in the development of an online, evidence-based resource that aims to support SLTs’ use of research in practice in the clinical management of children with phonological impairment. The resource is called SuSSD (Supporting and understanding Speech Sound Disorder) and was found to have high face validity.
Conclusion: Integrating SuSSD into SLTs’ decision-making should support their use of research in practice and improve outcomes for children with phonological impairment. Further research is necessary to determine if SuSSD can effectively increase SLTs’ use of research in practice and improve speech outcomes for children with phonological impairment.

What do children with speech sound disorders think about their talking?

The following manuscript has been accepted for publication
McCormack, J., McLeod, S., & Crowe, K. (in press). What do children with speech sound disorders think about their talking? Seminars in Speech and Language.
Here is the abstract:

Investigating children’s feelings and attitudes toward talking assists speech–language pathologists (SLPs) to understand experiences of communication and the impact of speech sound disorders (SSD). This, in turn, can assist SLPs in identifying appropriate intervention for children with SSD that addresses the needs of children, and their communication partners. This paper draws on data from the Sound Start Study in Australia to explore the attitudes toward talking of 132 preschool-aged children with SSD and the relationship between children’s attitudes, speech accuracy, and parent-reported intelligibility and participation. Most of these children with SSD had a positive attitude toward talking. There was a significant relationship between children’s attitudes toward talking and speech accuracy. Furthermore, there was a significant relationship between speech accuracy and parents’ perceptions of intelligibility and participation. However, there was no significant relationship between children’s attitudes and parents’ perceptions. These results highlight similarities and differences between attitudes and experiences of preschool-aged children, their performance on clinical measures, and their parents’ perspectives, indicating the need for SLPs to consider each of these areas during assessment and intervention.

Communication milestones

Last year Speech Pathology Australia produced a Communication Milestones Poster. Recently we have been invited to contribute sections on multilingual speech acquisition as they plan to have it translated into a number of different languages.
Here are some references we used to update it:

• McLeod, S., & Crowe, K. (2018). Children’s consonant acquisition in 27 languages: A cross-linguistic review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27, 1546–1571. doi:10.1044/2018_AJSLP-17-0100 
• McLeod, S., Crowe, K., & Shahaeian, A. (2015). Intelligibility in Context Scale: Normative and validation data for English-speaking preschoolers. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 46, 266-276. doi:10.1044/2015_LSHSS-14-0120