CeTasSSD research and pathways meeting

Our CeTasSSD team met throughout the day to work on the data, data analysis, writing of papers, and how this translates into a speech pathway for kindergarten children.

Felicity Laurence, Lisa Johnson, Sharynne  McLeod, Sarah Verdon

Writing papers for our CeTasSSD grant

We have allocated our Mondays to writing papers for our CeTasSSD grant. Our data have been carefully entered, cleaned and analysed - and we are now making sense of what the data have told us.

Today Felicity Laurence, Sarah Verdon and I spent the day continuing to working on the 2025 Intelligibility in Context Scale data to be submitted to a special issue. It was an extremely productive day - and we were able to show how robust our data are. We built on the literature review that was written by Kate Crowe and the analysis that was completed by Nicola Ivory earlier this year. It's nearly ready to submit.

 

Welcome back Audrey

 I am so excited to welcome back Dr Audrey (Cen) Wang to work with me for 2 days/week as a statistician on our Catholic Education Tasmania research grant. Audrey has published so many important papers with our team. It will be wonderful to work with her again.

 

CET consultation about children who speak languages other than English at home

This afternoon, as part of our research grant with Catholic Education Tasmania, I spent 3.5 hours having 15 minute appointments with Tasmanian speech pathologists about kindergarten students attending CET schools who have learned English as another language. Felicity Laurence and I were impressed at how the speech pathologists had taken on board the information provided last year at the CET workshop and also our free online materials from the Multilingual Children's Speech website. This year, they had more evidence of incorporating knowledge about specific language's phonology into their reports and decision making. Congratulations colleagues.

CET statistics

Our data for the Catholic Education Tasmania Speech Sound Disorder (CeTasSSD) grant is coming in thick and fast - so now we are gearing up for statistical analysis. This morning I met with Dr Nicola Ivory to plan our work on the Intelligibility in Context Scale data.

Launch of Phon 4

Congratulations to Yvan Rose and Greg Hedlund and team who launched Phon 4 today (their Thursday 16th April - our Friday 17th April).

https://www.phon.ca/phon-manual/getting_started.html 

Our CeTasSSD team were very honoured to work with Yvan to install and begin using Phon 4 on its first day of release. Yvan has been very generous preparing our speech sample and teaching us how to use it effectively to analyse the data we have collected from our Tasmanian Speech Census.

Helen, Sharynne, Emma, Felicity, Yvan, Ally - meeting #2

Yvan, Emma, Helen, Felicity, Sharynne  - meeting #1

Thank you Tasmania

I have had a lovely time in Tasmania meeting a LOT of 4 year olds, teaching assistants (TAs), school support coordinators (SSC), teachers, principals, speech pathologists and others - as well as experiencing the food, history, and scenery of the island. Thanks Felicity and Lisa and CET and Tassie.

Enjoying research with rural Tasmanian children during week 2 of the CET speech census

On Thursday and Friday this week I have traveled to rural locations to undertake research with 4- and 5-year-old children in Catholic Education Tasmania schools for our CET speech census. 

 The children have been great - and the staff have been welcoming, resourceful, knowledgeable and supportive. I have learned a lot, and understand more about schools and children's speech - as well as how to create the best processes for screening children's speech across CET in 2027. 

 

Rural locations know how to be welcoming. Thanks for the unexpected latte that arrived mid morning and your enthusiasm about our treehouse poster! https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acquisition/learning-english-consonants

 This is the end of week 2 of screening.  Felicity, Lisa, Sarah, Helen, Ally, Emma and myself have been working with children in schools (either in person or via Zoom). We have met a lot of children - but still have more to go. Next week we will continue :) 

Catholic Education Tasmania workshop: Speech Difficulties in EALD Leamers: The role of speech pathology

Today I presented a workshop run by Catholic Education Tasmania titled "Speech Difficulties in EALD Leamers: The role of speech pathology"  (11am - 5pm). It was wonderful to share our research and the rich and informative resources that we have made available on the Multilingual Children's Speech website to speech pathologists from across Tasmania. The food was delicious too!

Meeting with Catholic Education Tasmania's executive leadership team

Yesterday afternoon I had the honour of visiting Catholic Education Tasmania's head office to share the updates from our collaborative research grant - and the importance of listening to parents' concerns to provide appropriate support for children's communication. Felicity Laurence, Lisa Johnson and I met for over an hour with Dr Terry McCarthy, Interim Executive Director of Catholic Education Tasmania and Matt Jones, Deputy Executive Director: School Services Catholic Education Tasmania.

Felicity Laurence (CET), Dr Terry McCarthy, and Sharynne 

Sharynne, Felicity, Lisa and Matt Jones

 

Assessing children's speech in Tasmania

I am in Tasmania this week to assess children's speech across the state as part of our research grant with Catholic Education Tasmania. It is wonderful to visit schools with Felicity Laurence and Lisa Johnson.

This is a really important study. One of the speech assistants aptly named this phase of the research the "CET speech census".

We currently have 785 consent forms and ICS data through Qualitrix. 

Some of the unique experiences from this week:

• Monday and Tuesday - Assessing 53 children across 4 different schools using the International Speech Screen (and some with the DEAP Screener) 
• A baby deer was shown to the children in the classroom we were visiting (very tiny and cute!)
• One child came three times to be assessed (he took his sticker off so we didn't remember he had been assessed before)
• Our treehouse speech sound poster (McLeod & Crowe, 2018) was on the speech room wall at one of the schools
• Tuesday - Negotiating the rain as we walked with children from their classrooms to the allocated research space
• Undertaking research in an art room 
• Enthusiastic children wanting it to be their turn :) 

Sharynne and Felicity ready for a day with Kinder children in Hobart

Sharynne  and Kate's treehouse poster was on the wall in the speech room at a school!

Sharynne and Lisa in the rain

Sharynne  and Lisa about to meet the next group of 4-year-olds

We also met with the private speech pathologists who assess CET children as part of the research on Wednesday morning 

CeTasSSD data planning and collection is underway

We have begun data collection for our CeTasSSD study! Tonight 715 entries have been recorded from the caregivers of 4- to 5-year-olds. While some entries will not be analysed (a few parents entered twice, some did not give consent to be involved in the research etc.), we are going to have a large number of children to help us learn about children's speech, and the best screening pathway for the state. Thank you to Kate Crowe, Felicity Laurence and Lisa Johnson who have overseen this online data collection phase from parents.

Today we also met to work through the practicalities of the data collection phase that begins next week to talk with children to listen to their production of speech sounds and learn from them about what they think about their speech. It was a really productive day of problem solving and getting things in place. Thanks Helen Blake, Ally Barrett, and Emma Scanlon - plus our special helper :)

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CeTasSSD - Meeting with Kate Crowe on her timezone while in Geneva

Working with people across the world can be a challenge - since someone is always a little sleepy in meetings due to the timezone challenge. Today, I enjoyed meeting with Kate Crowe on almost the same timezone (Iceland-Geneva) to discuss our Catholic Education Tasmania Speech Sound Disorder research grant - including the excellent data from 2025 and finessing our plans for 2026.

 

Planning 2026 data collection in Tasmania

This morning our research team planned our 2026 data collection in Tasmania. We have wonderful preliminary data from 2025, and at the end of this month Sarah Verdon will interview people involved in the research during 2025. Our 2026 data collection will involve every 4- to 5-year-old child across the school population to determine speech screening pathways to be used into the future. We are excited to be working with Felicity Laurence who will undertake her PhD with us next year, and Lisa Johnson from CET.

Our first data have arrived for our research with Catholic Education Tasmania

Today was an exciting day that we have worked for >1 year to achieve. We received the first set of data from Catholic Education Tasmania from 561 4-to-5-year-old children. Hooray! Now we can begin to analyse the data to co-create new pathways to support children with speech sound disorders.

 

Catholic Education Tasmania population study of speech sound disorder

We meet weekly with the Catholic Education Tasmania team (Felicity, Lisa and Udari) regarding our population study of speech sound disorders (SSD). We looked at de-identified data of the Intelligibility in Context Scale from 1,133 4-to 5-year-olds today. 27 control (typically developing) children and many children with suspected SSD have received a DEAP assessment. This is a large and important study. 

Advising colleagues on the speech of children who speak languages other than English

Today I had a fascinating day advising colleagues on how to consider the speech of children who speak languages other than English. The children's parents were concerned about their speech - and the current processes only allow for assessment in English. 

We talked about the usefulness of the following websites:

• Multilingual Children's Speech - https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech
  
• Speech Accent Archive - https://accent.gmu.edu/browse_native.php

and the processes that are recommended using the SACHL - https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments/sachl

Population data - The importance of working with key data managers

Today I was able to meet with "Data Debbie" from Catholic Education Tasmania. She is overseeing our data entry once our project is signed off and ready to officially begin with CET. We discussed the importance of demographic data, understanding missing data, and also the possibility of scanning data into Excel straight from the ICS forms! Thanks Debbie, Lisa and Udari!

 

Hooray! Ethics approval

We were very pleased to receive approval from the CSU Human Research Ethics Committee today for our research with Catholic Education Tasmania. Now we can begin. Hooray!

Tasmanian research planning

It is such a pleasure to collaborate with the team from Catholic Education Tasmania. They are rigorous, responsive, and care for the children in Tasmania. We are planning for our research this year - and are getting closer to finalising the procedures and protocols.