Dr. Ellen S. Kester, President of Bilinguistics Speech and Language Services (www.bilinguistics.com) in Austin, TX has just written a blogpost about the impact of our research into children's speech development (https://bilinguistics.com/a-summary-of-current-speech-acquisition-data-across-27-languages/) before I present a keynote address at the Bilinguistics Conference in a few weeks' time. Here are a few quotes:
"The word “landmark” is an Olde English word originally used to describe the expansion of the boundaries of a kingdom. Nowadays, this word is typically reserved to describe changes in legislation which will have a massive impact on our lives. I think it’s fair to use this word to describe two speech acquisition data studies that came out right before the pandemic and that have huge implications for how we do our jobs as SLPs. New speech acquisition data published by Dr. Sharynne McLeod and Dr. Kate Crowe challenges some long-held beliefs about how and when sounds emerge. Results suggests that developmental norms are common across all languages, initial sounds develop as early as age 2, and the majority of sounds are mastered by age 5, including the American /r/."
"Dr. Sharynne McLeod is so easy to listen to and her humility is pervasive in everything she shares. If you are new to her work, there are some things we don’t want to skip past: Her work spans decades. She received funding and traveled extensively to the countries of many of the languages she studied. She purchased and explored oodles of evaluations tools in multiple languages to understand the normative data on which they are based. Her country is her lab: The people working with and for her are out in the rural communities, towns, and urban centers of Australia. And what is the result? Possibly the greatest data set accumulated on speech acquisition..."
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| https://bilinguistics.com/slp-conference-presentations/ |
