January 29, 2021

Planning 2021

I mentor lots of different people in my role as professor. This week I have met with the following people: 

  • I am an official mentor for Prof Julie Marshall in the Manchester Metropolitan University Good to Great program. 
  • I am a mentor for Dr Helen Blake in my role as Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology,  Sydney. 
  • I am a mentor for many CSU colleagues including Dr Heather Boetto, Dr Tamara Cumming, Kate Margetson.

It is such an honour to share the journey with these women. I learn so much.

Dr Helen Blake, UTS

 

January 28, 2021

IMPACT Measures Tool

IMPACT Measures Tool (https://impact.ecprism.org/) has just been launched.

Here is the annoucement: 

The University of Oregon’s EC PRISM team has officially launched The IMPACT Measures Tool, a free repository of early childhood and parenting measures that simplifies the process of finding, comparing, and accessing measurement tools. All measures on IMPACT are scored on their usability, cost, cultural relevance, and technical merit. IMPACT provides:
· A database of measurement and assessment tools in a variety of domains
· A science-driven scoring system to identify each measure’s key features and strengths
· Educational resources on measurement in early childhood
The IMPACT Measures Tool was developed to address the need for an easy way to access a variety of early childhood measures, to understand the key features of each measure, and to make informed decisions when selecting measures.
Visit https://impact.ecprism.org/ to access the tool and start searching for measures. Please reach out to ecprism@uoregon.edu for questions or additional information

Advances in Communication and Swallowing

Today I accepted an invitation to be an editorial board member of Advances in Communication and Swallowing, the academic journal affiliated with the Irish Association of Speech and Language Therapists (IASLT) to be launched later in 2021. Dr Julie Regan and Dr Irene P.Walsh are the new Editors-in-Chief.

January 27, 2021

2021 Zoom meetings have begun...

The end of January heralds the beginning of the academic year for us - and meetings. This week has only has 4 working days due to a public holiday, but includes meetings with an international association, our faculty, research teams, mentees (CSU and international), research groups, etc etc. The year has begun.

Congratulations Mr Dien - soon to be Dr Dien

Congratulations to Mr Dien who submitted his PhD recently 

https://trinhfoundation.org/stories/unforgettable-day-for-mr-dien/

I first met Mr Dien in 2011 when he was class captain of the first speech therapy course in Vietnam and have followed his journey across the years. What a milestone for him, the speech therapy profession in Vietnam, and the Trinh Foundation.

Some of my other blogposts about Mr Dien are here: https://speakingmylanguages.blogspot.com/search?q=Dien

January 25, 2021

IALP Child Speech Committee Meeting

Tonight  will attend the IALP Child Speech Committee Meeting. It is truely an international committee. Here are the timezones for the meeting: 

  • Montréal, Canada Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 06:00 EST 
  • London, United Kingdom Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 11:00 GMT 
  • Reykjavik, Iceland Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 11:00 GMT 
  • Cork, Ireland Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 11:00 GMT 
  • Valletta, Malta Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 12:00 CET 
  • Bonn, Germany Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 12:00 CET 
  • Cape Town, South Africa Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 13:00 SAST 
  • Kuwait City, Kuwait Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 14:00 AST 
  • Hanoi, Vietnam Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 18:00 ICT 
  • Hong Kong, Hong Kong Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 19:00 HKT 
  • Sydney, Australia Mon, 25 Jan 2021 at 22:00 AEDT 

One important announcement is that the IALP conference in New Zealand has been moved to 19-24 August 2023.

January 22, 2021

VietSpeech fun

During our VietSpeech writing retreat we also had fun exploring local attractions in between our research, data analysis and writing.





January 19, 2021

VietSpeech team retreat in Bathurst

This week the VietSpeech team are meeting in Bathurst. We are writing a paper from Study 4, finalising revisions of three papers from Study 1, analysing data, reviewing the goals we proposed in our ARC Discovery grant, and planning and prioritising tasks for 2021. We have really enjoyed spending time together, are so proud of all we have achieved to date, and will be on track to finalise the grant this year.

VietSpeech team: Kate Margetson, Dr Sarah Verdon, Prof Sharynne McLeod, Dr Cen (Audrey) Wang, Dr Van H. Tran

Others currently working on the VietSpeech grant as casual research assistants are Katherine White and Lily To - and Dr. Ben Pham is our consultant in VietNam.


 

January 14, 2021

Icelandic children’s acquisition of consonants and consonant clusters

The following article has been accepted for publication: 

Másdóttir, T. & McLeod, S. & Crowe, K. (2021, in press). Icelandic children’s acquisition of consonants and consonant clusters. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research

Here is the abstract:

Purpose. This study investigated Icelandic-speaking children’s acquisition of singleton consonants and consonant clusters.
Method. Participants were 437 typically-developing children aged 2;6 to 7;11 acquiring Icelandic as their first language. Single-word speech samples of the 47 single consonants and 45 consonant clusters were collected using Málhljóðapróf ÞM [ÞM's Test of Speech Sound Disorders].
Results. Percentage of consonants correct for children aged 2;6-2;11 was 73.12 (SD = 13.33) and increased to 98.55 (SD = 3.24) for children aged 7;0-7;11. Overall, singleton consonants were more likely to be accurate than consonant clusters. The earliest consonants to be acquired were /m, n, p, t, j, h/ in word-initial position and /f, l/ within words. The last consonants to be acquired were /x, r, r̥, s, θ, n̥/, and consonant clusters in word-initial /sv-, stl-, str-, skr-, θr-/, within-word /-ðr-, -tl-/, and word-final /-kl̥, -xt/ contexts. Within-word phonemes were more often accurate than those in word-initial position, with word-final position the least accurate. Accuracy of production was significantly related to increasing age, but not sex.
Conclusion. This is the first comprehensive study of consonants and consonant cluster acquisition by typically developing Icelandic-speaking children. The findings align with trends for other Germanic languages; however, there are notable language-specific differences of clinical importance.

Here is the feedback we received from the reviewer and editor in the acceptance email: 

"There is paucity of information regarding the acquisition of consonants in Icelandic. A total of 437 children with typical speech and language development, ages 2;6 to 7;11, participated in the study. The manuscript reports percentage of consonants correct and ages of acquisition of consonants and consonant clusters...The study has great clinical significance as there is a paucity of information on the acquisition of consonants in Iceland. The manuscript now has very clear potential to advance the discipline; the detailed tables and figures will be very useful clinically..."

We began discussing this work in Italy in 2013, then started working on it in Iceland in 2014 - so are really pleased it is finally in press: https://speakingmylanguages.blogspot.com/2014/06/thank-you-thora.html

January 9, 2021

Catching up with colleagues (i.e., friends) while on holidays

 Colleagues are friends. Holidays are a good time to catch up.

Dr Nicole Watts Pappas

Dr Ben Pham and Minh

Emeritis Prof Lindy McAllister and Vida

January 7, 2021

Big Voices

Today I visited the Big Voices exhibition at the Queensland State Library https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/bigvoices. 

The exhibited artwork was created by children in Australia, Vietnam and China collected by Dr Barbara Piscitelli in her Children's Art Archive. There were a number of correlations with the Children Draw Talking project we undertook between 2009-2013.

Big Voices celebrates this courage and creativity of children sharing their stories through art.

Dr Piscitelli's archive is available here: https://collections.slq.qld.gov.au/guide/7116/details

There are collections about children's rights and other collections titled "Children's Picture Diaries" that depicts "children’s ideas of who they are, where they live and what they like to do" https://collections.slq.qld.gov.au/guide/7116/details#SR00007116-13


 This exhibit reminded me of our Children Draw Talking research: https://speakingmylanguages.blogspot.com/search?q=Children+draw+talking

January 6, 2021

Resting...


January is time for rest for many Australians as it is our summer holidays. I saw this koala on my holidays and it is the first time I have seen a koala in the wild. While I am not sleeping 18-22 hours/day like a koala - I am working hard to have a good rest from the demands of work.

Speech acquisition within a 3-generation Vietnamese-English family

The first paper from Study 2 of VietSpeech has just been published online: 

McLeod, S., Margetson, K., Wang, C., Tran, V. T., Verdon, S., White, K., & Phạm, B. (2021). Speech acquisition within a 3-generation Vietnamese-English family: The influence of maturation and ambient phonology. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics. Advance online publication https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2020.1862915

Free access to the paper here: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/FVQDRPRPPNIUAG96CNKP/full?target=10.1080/02699206.2020.1862915