AJSLP Editor's Award

The American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology has awarded Dr Kate Crowe and myself the prestigious Editor's Award for 2018 for the following article:
McLeod, S. & Crowe, K. (2018). Children’s consonant acquisition in 27 languages: A cross-linguistic review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27, 1546-1571. doi:10.1044/2018_AJSLP-17-0100
Freely available here : https://ajslp.pubs.asha.org/article.aspx?articleid=2701897
The free images for English consonant acquisition are here: https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acquisition

Here is the ASHA website announcing all of the award winners: https://on.asha.org/2KTVq3Z
The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association has over 204,000 members, and over 15,000 people attended the convention. They publish 4 journals, so it was a great honour to receive this award. We also received an Editor's Award last year for another ASHA journal (details here).

Our paper not only won the Editor's Award, but has been described as the paper that "broke" the speech-language pathology (SLP) internet due to the discussion about the impact it would have on SLPs' daily practices: https://speakingmylanguages.blogspot.com/2019/04/impact-apparently-we-broke-internet.html

Here is the news release from the University of Iceland about our award:
In English: https://english.hi.is/news/awarded_for_best_scientific_article_in_speech_pathology
In Icelandic: https://www.hi.is/frettir/verdlaunud_fyrir_bestu_visindagreinina_i_talmeinafraedi

ASHA Awards Ceremony announcement of our award

Dr Kate Crowe and Prof Sharynne McLeod

All of the ASHA journal editors' awardees

Sharynne and Kate with Dr Lemmietta McNeilly (ASHA Chief of Staff)

Children's Consonant Acquisition presentation

I have created an 18 minute video presentation titled "Children's Consonant Acquisition".
It can be downloaded here: https://cloudstor.aarnet.edu.au/plus/s/3Z2fDvDvR4voMhz (58.9MB .mp4 file)

The presentation profiles the following paper:
McLeod, S., & Crowe, K. (2018). Children's consonant acquisition in 27 languages: A cross-linguistic review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27, 1546–1571. https://doi.org/10.1044/2018_AJSLP-17-0100
 The paper can be downloaded for free here: https://ajslp.pubs.asha.org/article.aspx?articleid=2701897

The presentation will be played at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association convention in Boston next week.

Here is the link to the posters that outline English-speaking children's speech acquisition:
https://speakingmylanguages.blogspot.com/2018/10/speech-acquisition-posters.html

The posters can be downloaded for free here:
https://www.csu.edu.au/research/vietspeech/publications

More information and resources about speech acquisition is available from our Multilingual Children's Speech website:
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acquisition
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acq-studies
 

Children’s consonant acquisition in 27 languages: A cross-linguistic review

The following manuscript has been accepted for publication:
McLeod, S. & Crowe, K. (2018, in press April). Children’s consonant acquisition in 27 languages: A cross-linguistic review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.

We believe that this will be a landmark publication - providing the most comprehensive cross-linguistic account of consonant acquisition ever undertaken in the world.

Here is the abstract:

Purpose: To provide a cross-linguistic review of acquisition of consonant phonemes to inform speech-language pathologists’ expectations of children’s developmental capacity by (1) identifying characteristics of studies of consonant acquisition, (2) describing general principles of consonant acquisition, and (3) providing case studies for English, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Method: A cross-linguistic review was undertaken of 60 papers describing 64 studies of consonant acquisition by 26,007 children from 31 countries in 27 languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Jamaican Creole, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Maltese, Mandarin (Putonghua), Portuguese, Setswana (Tswana), Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, and Xhosa. Results: Most studies were cross-sectional and examined single word production. Combining data from 27 languages, the majority of the world’s consonants were acquired by 5;0 (years;months). By 5;0 children produced at least 93 percent of consonants correctly. Plosives, nasals, and non-pulmonic consonants (e.g., clicks) were acquired earlier than trills, flaps, fricatives, and affricates. Most labial, pharyngeal, and posterior lingual consonants were acquired earlier than consonants with anterior tongue placement. However, there was an interaction between place and manner where plosives and nasals produced with anterior tongue placement were acquired earlier than anterior trills, fricatives, and affricates. Conclusion: Children across the world acquire consonants at a young age. Five-year-old children have acquired most consonants within their ambient language; however, individual variability should be considered.

Here is a graphic we have created to summarize the English consonant acquisition data