Our manuscript titled "Methods of Diagnosing Speech Sound Disorders in Multilingual Children" has just been accepted for publication in the "Changemaker" Special Forum for the Q1 journal Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. It came about because our session at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association convention in 2024 was one of the few that was awarded "changemaker" status - so we were invited to write up our submission. Thanks to Karla and Kate for leading this important paper. Here is the reference and abstract:
Washington, K. N., Crowe, K., McLeod, S., Margetson, K., Bazzocchi, N. B. M., Kokotek, L. E., van der Straten Waillet, P., Másdóttir, T., & Volhardt M. D. S., (2025, in press). Methods of diagnosing speech sound disorders in multilingual children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.
Purpose: Identification of speech sound disorder (SSD) in children who are multilingual is challenging for many speech-language pathologists (SLPs). This may be due to a lack of clinical resources to accurately identify SSD in multilingual children as easily as for monolingual children. The purpose of this paper is to describe features of multilingual speech acquisition, identify evidence-based resources for the differential diagnosis of SSD in speakers of under-studied language paradigms, and to demonstrate how culturally responsive practices can be achieved in different linguistic contexts.
Method: Examples of different approaches used to inform accurate diagnosis of SSD in 2- to 8-year-old multilingual children are described. The approaches used included: (a) considering adult speech models, (b) completing validation studies, and (c) streamlining evidence-informed techniques. These methods were applied across four different language paradigms in countries within the Global North and Global South (e.g., Jamaican Creole-English, Jamaica; Vietnamese-English, Australia; French and additional languages, Belgium; Icelandic-Polish, Iceland). The culturally responsive nature of approaches in each cultural/linguistic setting is highlighted as well as the broader applicability of these approaches.
Results: Findings related to dialect specific features, successful validation of tools to describe functional speech intelligibility and production accuracy, and the utility of different techniques applied in the diagnosis of SSD are outlined.
Conclusions: Culturally responsive methods offer a useful framework for guiding SLPs’ diagnostic practices. However, successful application of these practices is best operationalized at a local level in response to the linguistic, cultural, and geographic context.
