Congratulations Dr. Karla Washington - Canada Research Chair

Congratulations to my colleague Dr. Karla Washington at the Universitiy of Toronto who has been named as a Canada Research Chair in Monolingual and Multilingual Paediatric Speech-Language Pathology (Tier 2). Here is a description about her work and appointment:

Speech sound disorder (SSD) and developmental language disorder (DLD) present significant barriers to academic and social participation, with the potential to negatively impact the speech and language development of children globally. Dr. Washington’s overarching research goal is to support children’s human right to effective communication by improving diagnosis and treatment of these disorders. Her research addresses misdiagnosis of SSD and DLD in multilingual preschoolers in an understudied context (Jamaican Creole-English) through diversification of theoretical and empirical approaches. She also aims to characterize the neural basis of DLD, with the goal of better understanding memory-language mechanisms underlying grammar learning and impairment.

University of Alberta PhD Candidacy Exam

This morning I was an external examiner for a University of Alberta PhD Candidacy Exam (online). It was a privilege to be involved in the examination process with colleagues from across Canada. Congratulations to the candidate and her supervisory team, chaired by Prof Karen Pollock.

Prof Karen Pollock and Prof Sharynne McLeod

Anne of Green Gables

"Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world."
- L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Mi'kmaq First Nations Heritage Centre

Helen Blake and I were privileged to visit the Millbrook Heritage Centre of the Mi'kmaq (Micmac) people during our visit to Nova Scotia, Canada. We learned that the seven teachings of the Mi'kmaq are: courage, respect, truth, love, humility, wisdom, and honesty. We learned about the legend of Glooscap (see below) and about the traditional and modern lives of the Mi'kmaq people. We also learned about their language, including that the Mi'kmaq alphabet has 11 consonants, 6 short vowels and 5 long vowels (see below).

A statue of Glooscap (note his size - I am on the left)

PhD meetings in Canada

While in Canada I have had the opportunity to work with my PhD students face-to-face on their PhDs, publications, and grants. They are all so productive and hard working. Additionally, it has been great to have them in one place to continue their excellent support for one another.

Sharynne, Sarah, Helen and Suzanne in Halifax

Working on Sarah's PhD exegesis and grant application

Working on Helen's grant application and presentations

25th anniversary of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association

Today ICPLA celebrated its 25th anniversary at the business meeting in Halifax, Canada. ICPLA was formed in March 1991 at the Symposium on Advances in Clinical Phonetics held at the Cardiff Institute of Higher Education, Wales. The current Executive Board members are:

• President: Hanne Gram Simonsen (Norway)
• Vice President: Sharynne McLeod (Australia)
• Secretary/treasurer/web: Marie Klopfenstein (USA)
• Ex-officio: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics
• Editors: Martin J. Ball/Nicole Müller (Sweden)

At the business meeting six people were honoured as Life Members of ICPLA:

William J. Hardcastle, Martin J. Ball, Nicole Müller, Sara Howard, Michael R. Perkins, Thomas W. Powell.

Michael Kiefte, Sharynne McLeod, Hanne Gram Simonsen, Martin Ball, Nicole Muller, Bill Hardcastle

International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children's Speech meeting in Halifax, Canada

Today members of the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children's Speech met in Halifax to begin our next project: to write a tutorial paper about how speech-language pathologists can provide speech intervention for multilingual children if they don't speak the language(s) as the child. The 3-hour conversation was rich and broad ranging, giving us a starting point for our work. We will hold another face-to-face meeting at the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP) conference in Dublin, Ireland in August, then work with the online panel to undertake the writing phase of the project. This topic is more complex than our tutorial on assessing multilingual children, since there is less published evidence available on what to do. This makes our task even more important.

IEPMCS members from Canada, Iceland, Australia, Germany, Croatia and Fiji

Suzanne and Daniel taking notes

Dinner after the IEPMCS meeting

PhD students in Canada

Three of my PhD students have traveled to Halifax, Canada for the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association Conference: Helen Blake, Suzanne Hopf and Sarah Masso. It is such a pleasure to spend time with them all (we all live in different cities, so most of our day-to-day interaction is online). It is also great to observe them networking and collaborating with colleagues from around the world. Each student is presenting a paper at the ICPLA conference, and is participating in workshops and meetings aligned with the conference. We have also been able to enjoy a little of Halifax's beauty, history, and delicious food.

Suzanne, Sarah, Helen and Sharynne at the Lord Nelson Hotel

Helen and Sharynne enjoying lobster at the Halifax harbourfront

Pursuit Award finalist

Sarah Verdon flew to Toronto, Canada to compete in the Pursuit Award for the best PhD in childhood disability. She came third, which was a fantastic achievement. Her PhD findings are summarized in this CSU news release titled early intervention must embrace diversity: http://news.csu.edu.au/latest-news/education/ripple/early-intervention-must-embrace-diversity,-research-shows

Pursuit Award

Sarah Verdon has been named as a finalist of the Pursuit Award. Here is the description of the award from the Bloorview Research Institute's website:

"The Pursuit Award recognizes current PhD students and recent alumni from around the globe for their outstanding achievements in childhood disability research.
Finalists are chosen based on significance of research results, methodologic rigour, empirical content, and impact on childhood disability care."

Sarah will fly to Canada in May to make a presentation about her research along with the other two finalists. The winner will be announced after the presentations.

 Jane McCormack was runner-up for this award in 2013.
It is wonderful to see that Charles Sturt University's PhD students are being recognised for making an important contribution to international childhood disability research.

International meeting about speech development at University of British Columbia, Canada

This week I attended a meeting titled: Knowledge Mobilization for an International Crosslinguistic Study of Children's Speech Development, held at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. The meeting, lead by Professors May Bernhardt and Joe Stemberger has brought together 60 people from across the globe who have been involved in an international study of children's speech development.

The meeting commenced with an international dinner and musical presentations from around the world including First Nations songs, Slovenian dancing, Appalachian fiddle music, English clogging, songs sung in Spanish,  Portuguese, and Slovenian, and Japanese and Australian children's songs. 

The week has included interesting presentations about children's acquisition of Icelandic, Slovenian, French (Manatoba, Quebec, European), Portuguese, Spanish (Spain, Chile, Mexico), Japanese, Korean, Arabic (Kuwait), and German. We learned to apply Phon, speech analysis software to our data (see additional blog entry). I presented an invited session on knowledge mobilization based on my Future Fellowship in a session on dissemination of knowledge. The meeting concluded with clinical applications of the shared international speech data.

Conxita Lleo (University of Hamburg), May Bernhardt (UBC), Sharynne McLeod, Joe Stemberger (UBC)

International Crosslinguistic Study of Children's Speech Development group

Martina Ozbič and Damjana Kogovšek from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Slovenian dancing at the welcome dinner

Hadeel Ayyad (Kuwait University) presenting a paper about Kuwaiti Arabic preschoolers' speech

Sharynne and Þóra Másdóttir (The National Hearing and Speech Institute of Iceland)

Children’s speech development in many languages: Strategies for telling the world what we have learned

On 9th August I will present an invited paper titled "Children’s speech development in many languages: Strategies for telling the world what we have learned" to the Knowledge Mobilization for an International Crosslinguistic Study of Children's Speech Development Meeting at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Here is the abstract:

This presentation will outline lessons learned from a 4-year research fellowship titled “Speaking my languages: Multilingual speech acquisition in Australia”. The aims of this fellowship were to: describe Australian children’s multilingualism, consider the association between multilingualism and communication impairment, review and re-imagine international speech-language pathology practices for working with multilingual children, and develop resources for the assessment of multilingual children. Knowledge translation has been an important component of this research. Traditional knowledge translation strategies have included dissemination within books, book chapters, journal articles, and conference presentations. The Multilingual Children’s Speech website (www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech) was created via collaboration with researchers from around the world and includes free resources for speech-language pathologists. Additionally, knowledge translation has been enhanced by using: radio, newspapers, Twitter, blogs, listservs, emails, handouts, and conversations. Participants will be invited to reflect on how knowledge translation strategies can be used to tell the world about the International Crosslinguistic Study of Children’s Speech Development.

Here are some of the weblinks that will support my presentation.
Recent publications

• Influence of bilingualism on speech production: A systematic review
  
• Children's acquisition of Hong Kong Cantonese consonants, vowels, and tones     
  
• Factors that enhance English-speaking speech-language pathologists’ transcription of Cantonese-speaking children’s consonants
• International aspirations for speech-language pathologists’ practice with multilingual children with speech sound disorders: Development of a position paper
•  Speech-language pathologists’ assessment and intervention practices with multilingual children 
• 
  
  A systematic review of cross-linguistic and multilingual speech and language outcomes for children with hearing loss

Multilingual Children's Speech website

• Speech assessments in languages other than English      
  
  • Intelligibility in Context Scale
  • English validation of Intelligibility in Context Scale 
• Multilingual children’s speech position paper   
  
• Multilingual children’s speech acquisition 
• Comparison between the speech sounds of English and other languages 

Special issues of the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology

• Multilingual and multicultural considerations in speech-language pathology 
• World Report on Disability and people with communication disability