I have been invited to be a plenary speaker at the International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech (ISMBS) 2025 to be held 16-19 June 2025 in Chania, Crete, Greece. I have just submitted the abstract for my presentation: https://speechandlanguage.louisiana.edu/ismbs/plenary-lectures
Multilingual Minds are Unlocking Global Knowledge, γνώση, 认识, إدراك, דַעַת, ज्ञान …
Distinguished Professor Sharynne McLeod
Children’s Voices Centre, Charles Sturt University, Australia
Global understandings of speech, language, and communication encompass knowledge from 7,000+ languages. Communication professionals who read English have access to research and evidence-based resources, assessments, and interventions in approximately 100 languages. Critiques of psychology and linguistics report that research has focussed on English, northern hemisphere Indo-European languages (Draper et al., 2023; Kidd & Garcia, 2022), and “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies” (Henrich et al., 2010). This presentation will commend the work of multilingual minds (researchers, professionals, and translators) who provide English-language access to global knowledge about speech, language, and communication. It will outline the decade of work of the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech, and knowledge contained within global initiatives including:
• The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World
• Multilingual Children’s Speech website (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acquisition/speech-acq-studies)
• Crosslinguistic Phonology Project (https://phonodevelopment.sites.olt.ubc.ca/),
• Multilingual Families Lab Familles Multilingues (https://bilingualacquisition.wordpress.com/)
• CHILDES (https://childes.talkbank.org/) and PhonBank (https://phon.talkbank.org/)
The presentation will conclude by challenging our reliance on English as the medium for knowledge dissemination and acknowledging the future potential of our connected multilingual world for greater understandings of speech, language, and communication.
