CVC affilates and adjuncts contribute papers to CLTT special issue

Listening to Children with Diverse Communication Abilities

Child Language Teaching and Therapy Special Issue (2026, volume 42) - Q1 journal

Guest editors: Sharynne McLeod and Holly McAlister*, Children’s Voices Centre, Charles Sturt University, Australia
CLTT Editors: Judy Clegg and Victoria Joffe

https://journals.sagepub.com/home/clt 

The entire special issue contains 17 papers written by people from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Ireland, New Zealand, UK

Here is my 2-minute video summary of the special issue:  https://charlessturt.zoom.us/rec/share/M6k58N7ZaAZsqNcKTpefR9bRT62DNI-tKN-5ov_9PT6h-6bh4j1K79Knb6d1Y7IO.WKRpGEL_LBPtpYv7
View in Zoom

It has been great to mentor and include so many CVC staff/affiliates/adjuncts/HDR students in the special issue:

• 6 CVC papers
• 2 CVC editors
• 19 CVC authors
• 8 CVC peer reviewers

1. Cologon, K. (2026). From space and voice to audience and influence: Methodological approaches to inclusive co-research with young children. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 42, https://doi.org/10.1177/02656590261470993
2. Deehan, H., McLeod, S. & Harrison, L. J. (2026). “Oh! I forgot the voice”: Comparing drawings of talking by children with and without speech sound disorder. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 42, https://doi.org/10.1177/02656590261433348
3. Gregoric, C., McLeod, S., Hopf, S. C., Downey, B., Rahman, A., Sikder, S., Zischke, C., Tran, V. H., Murray, E., McAlister, H., Ivory, N., Delli-Pizzi, L., Elwick, S., Dealtry, L., Davies, J. (2026). Advancing the Sustainable Development Goals by listening to children’s voices across the globe. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 42, https://doi.org/10.1177/02656590251406102
4. McAlister, H., McLeod, S., & Hopf, S. C. (2026). Ladders, trees and matrixes: Child-focused participatory action research frameworks for children with diverse communication abilities. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 42, https://doi.org/10.1177/02656590261455298
5. McCormack, J., Cronin, A., McLeod, S., Ireland, M., Wang, C., & Tiong, C. (2026). Children’s drawings of intervention for childhood apraxia of speech: Place, people, activity, and emotion. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 42, https://doi.org/10.1177/02656590251375340
6. McLeod, S. (2026). Large listening ears are not enough: How can we mature in our practices to listen to children? Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 42, https://doi.org/10.1177/02656590261477289

*bolded text = CVC affiliate/adjunct/HDR student

 

Publication impact

Kate Crowe and wrote two papers summarizing children's speech acquisition. Recently we learned that they are two of the three papers that are the most downloaded of any papers published in the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association journals. WOW!

• Children's English Consonant Acquisition in the United States: A Review, authored by Kathryn Crowe and Sharynne McLeod and published in AJSLP in November 2020 currently has 298, 831 downloads.  At the current rate it will pass 300,000 downloads sometime this month.
• Children's Consonant Acquisition in 27 Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Review, authored by Sharynne McLeod and Kathryn Crowe and published in the November 2018 edition of AJSLP is currently at 205,471 downloads. 

Journal articles published in 2025

 Here are the journal articles I co-authored with my students and colleagues that were published in 2025:

1. Margetson, K., McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (2025). Cross-linguistic transfer in Vietnamese-English speech. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 56(4), 1192-1216. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_LSHSS-25-00046
2. van Doornik, A., Franken, M. C., McLeod, S., Terband, H., & Gerrits, E. (2025). Children’s, parents’, and experts’ perception of speech and communication. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 56(4), 1042-1053 https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_LSHSS-24-00140
3. Bartlett, S. & McLeod, S. (2025). Caregivers’ insights into supporting their late talkers using Target Word™ Hanen® Parent Program.  International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27(5), 702–716 https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2024.2438103
4. McLeod, S., Gregoric, C., Davies, J., Dealtry, L., Delli-Pizzi, L., Downey, B., Elwick, S., Hopf, S. C., Ivory, N., McAlister, H., Murray, E., Rahman, A., Sikder, S., Tran, V. H., & Zischke, C. (2025). Children draw talking around the world. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 56(4), 1088-1109. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_LSHSS-23-00190
5. 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). Methods of diagnosing speech sound disorders in multilingual children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 56(3), 469-487.  https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_LSHSS-24-00099
6. McLeod, S., Harrison, L. J., McMahon, C., Wang, C., & Evans, J. R. (2025). Parent-reported speech and language in early childhood is an early indicator of Indigenous Australian children’s literacy and numeracy outcomes. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 56(3), 730-746. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_LSHSS-23-00200
7. Downey, B., Gibbs, L., Letts, W., & McLeod, S. (2025). Cultivating collaborative practice to sustain and retain early childhood educators. Education Sciences, 15(11), 1451. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15111451 
8. Hurley, C. R., McLeod, S., & Anthonappa, R. P. (2025). Extraction of primary maxillary incisors and children’s speech production: A case series. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 39(4–5), 427–439. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2024.2355481
9. van Doornik, A., Welbie, M., McLeod, S., Gerrits, E., & Terband, H. (2025). Speech and language therapists’ insights into severity of speech sound disorders in children for developing the speech sound disorder severity construct. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 60, e70022. https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.70022

Caregiver-implemented Hanen® programs: A narrative review of programs for children with speech, language and communication needs

Congratulations to Sarah Bartlett who has had her first journal article accepted for publication from her PhD: 

Bartlett, S. & McLeod, S. (2025, in press December). Caregiver-implemented Hanen® programs: A narrative review of programs for children with speech, language and communication needs. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology

Here is the abstract: 

Purpose: Hanen® programs have been used by clinicians to support caregivers of young children with communication needs to learn optimal ways to respond in everyday interactions and facilitate child-oriented strategies that promote interaction and language. This review aimed to evaluate peer-reviewed literature regarding Hanen® programs for children with speech, language, and communication needs regarding the credibility, nature, quality, scope of the research, and outcomes of the research findings.
Method: The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) protocol was used. Of 196 papers documenting Hanen® interventions, 57 papers met inclusion criteria. Studies were synthesized and evaluated to rate (a) credibility/ levels of evidence, (b) nature of existing research: efficacy, effectiveness, and perceived effectiveness, (c) quality of the studies, (d) scope of evidence, and (e) outcomes for each Hanen® program for children with speech, language, and communication needs.
 Results: Credibility: Studies of Hanen® programs were reviews (7%), randomized controlled trials (17.5%), non-randomized controlled trials and mixed methods (31.6%), case-control or cohort studies (26.3%), qualitative reviews (1.8%) or employed qualitative methods (15.7%). Nature: The majority were efficacy studies (57.9%), others were perceived effectiveness (24.6%), and effectiveness studies (8.8%). Quality: Few studies were rated as high quality. Scope: Most studies related to two Hanen® programs (It Takes Two To Talk® and More Than Words®) conducted across eleven countries (Canada, USA, Spain, Turkey, Republic of Ireland, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Australia, Hong-Kong, Singapore, Malaysia), and a few studies evaluated adaptations of Hanen® programs (e.g., telehealth). The studies reported on dyad interactions; child language, behavior, and autism; and caregiver perceptions, stress, and self-efficacy. Outcomes: Evidence supporting significant communication outcomes for different programs exists; however mixed results demonstrate a variety of language, interaction, acceptability, feasibility, and maintenance outcomes. 
Conclusions: A range of evidence supports the use of Hanen® programs in its original format, with acceptability reported by families from target communities (e.g., middle class families) and educators (e.g., westernized countries). Effectiveness studies in real world contexts conclude that future research could evaluate content flexibility and adaptations to meet a diversity of families and communities. A precision family initiative (PFI) has been suggested to shift future research from does Hanen® work, to how can Hanen®-based intervention optimize outcomes for individual families.

Cultivating Collaborative Practice to Sustain and Retain Early Childhood Educators

Congratulations Belinda on the acceptance of your article from you PhD

Downey, B., Gibbs, L., Letts, W., & McLeod, S. (2025). Cultivating collaborative practice to sustain and retain early childhood educators. Education Sciences, [Manuscript accepted for publication]. 

Multilingual Speech Assessment: Using an Implementation Science Framework to Explore Acceptability of the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL)

Congratulations Kate Margetson who has just had the following manuscript accepted for publication that was written during her postdoc It is the next step in the research about the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL)

Margetson, K. & McLeod, S. (2025). Multilingual speech assessment: Using an implementation science framework to explore acceptability of the Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL). American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. Advance online publication. 
 

Here is the abstract

Purpose: The Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL) offers a new, evidence-based clinical protocol for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to assess speech in unfamiliar languages. This study used implementation science to investigate SLPs’ current multilingual speech assessment practices, determine the prospective acceptability of the SACHL, and compare current confidence to prospective confidence with the SACHL.
Method: The Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) and Theoretical Framework of Acceptability (TFA) were used to explore innovation deliverers’ (SLPs’ and student SLPs) prospective acceptability of the innovation (SACHL). Attendees at in-person and online SACHL presentations were invited to participate. 360 participants commenced an online questionnaire exploring current practices, transcription skills, confidence and acceptability of the SACHL. Statistical tests compared attendees at different presentations, SLPs and students SLPs, and monolingual and multilingual participants. 
Results: The majority of participants indicated low current confidence in assessing multilingual children. Most SLPs assessed, transcribed, and analyzed multilingual children’s speech in English; but rarely or never applied these practices in children’s home language(s). The majority of participants rated the SACHL as being culturally responsive, well-designed, easy to understand, and that it would increase diagnostic accuracy. There were concerns around the time burden in using the SACHL. Most (87.45%) indicated they would like to use the SACHL in clinical practice, and there was a statistically significant improvement between current confidence and prospective confidence.
Conclusions: The SACHL was evaluated by SLPs and student SLPs to be an acceptable clinical protocol to assess children’s speech in unfamiliar languages.

Page proofs of our next paper

Today Dr Kate Margetson and I discussed many topics including data analysis for our work on the SACHL, very positive feedback on a journal article, a book chapter, and page proofs on her latest journal article:

Margetson, K., McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (2025, in press June). Cross-linguistic transfer in Vietnamese-English speech. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 

 

ACCEPTED for publication - Children draw talking around the world

What wonderful news. Our innovative interdisciplinary Children Draw Talking paper has been accepted for publication today:

McLeod, S., Gregoric, C., Davies, J., Dealtry, L., Delli-Pizzi, L., Downey, B., Elwick, S., Hopf, S. C., Ivory, N., McAlister, H., Murray, E., Rahman, A., Sikder, S., Tran, V. H., & Zischke, C. (2025, in press). Children draw talking around the world. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. Manuscript accepted for publication. 

Here is the short summary

200 children from 24 countries drew who they talk to (friends, family, animals, professionals), when and where they talk (outside, at home), what they talk about (toys, animals, friends, family), and how they feel about talking (happy). These insights promote understanding of children’s communication and inform how children’s insights can be included in assessment and intervention.

Here is the abstract

Purpose. The purpose of this study is to determine how children from across the world draw themselves talking and to apply an interdisciplinary analysis to understand children’s perspectives to improve delivery of services at school.
Method. Participants were 200 children from 24 countries who submitted a drawing of themselves talking to someone using the Early Childhood Voices Drawing Protocol. Drawings were uploaded to Charles Sturt University’s Children Draw Talking Global Online Gallery. The participants were 2–12 years (M = 6.13), spoke 23 languages, and 28.5% of caregivers reported concerns about their children’s talking. A 16-member interdisciplinary research team analyzed the drawings using: descriptive, developmental, focal point, meaning making, and systemic functional linguistics transitivity analysis frameworks.
Results. Children could draw themselves talking. The participants’ age and ability to draw a human figure was strongly correlated. Most participants reported they felt happy about talking and drew themselves talking to one or more conversational partner(s), with focal points that included body parts and facial expressions, talking and listening, proximity to others, relationships and connections, and positivity and vibrancy. The cultural-historical meaning making analysis identified ten themes: relationships, places, actions, natural elements, human-made elements, cultural experiences, logical thinking, emotion, imagination, and concepts. The systemic functional linguistics transitivity analysis identified 71 processes, 134 participants, and 48 circumstances indicating richness in the children’s depictions of talking.
Conclusions. Children across the world can use drawing to communicate who they talk to (friends, family, animals, professionals), when and where they talk (outside, at home), what they talk about (toys, animals, friends, family), and how they feel about talking (happy). These insights promote understanding of children’s communication and inform how children’s insights can be included in assessment and intervention.

 
The children’s drawings are available here:  

• Children Draw Talking Global Online Gallery via the Children’s Voices Centre https://www.csu.edu.au/research/childrens-voices-centre/research/childrens-voices
• YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRXcSAl_dA7YoGpVsg-oyKe3et80WnfVl
• Submission to the United Nations: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/youth/hr75/submissions/subm-views-youth-led-cso-early-childhood-interdisciplinary-resear.pdf

200 children from 24 countries drew themselves talking

Children’s, parents’, and experts’ perception of speech and communication

The following article has been accepted for publication in Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools: "Children’s, parents’, and experts’ perception of speech and communication". It is part of Anniek Van Doornik's PhD research. Congratulations Anniek!

Here is the reference and abstract:

van Doornik, A., Franken, M. C., McLeod, S., Terband, H., & Gerrits, E. (2025). Children’s, parents’, and experts’ perception of speech and communication. Advance online publication. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 

Purpose: To improve our knowledge of how young children with speech sound disorders (SSD) perceive their own speech and communication in comparison with typically developing children (TD), and how these perceptions relate to parental judgment of communicative participation, intelligibility in different contexts, and an expert measure of children’s speech accuracy (PCCI).
Method: Participants were 111 Dutch-speaking children (48-89 months old): 65 with SSD and 46 who were TD. Children’s self-reports on the Dutch version of the Communication Attitude Test for Preschool and Kindergarten Children Who Stutter (KiddyCAT-NL) were compared (a) between SSD and TD groups and (b) with the parents’ ratings. Parents’ ratings were obtained from two parental questionnaires: Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six-34: Dutch (FOCUS-34NL) measuring communicative participation and the Intelligibility in Context Scale: Dutch (ICS-NL). The KiddyCAT-NL, FOCUS-34NL, and ICS-NL outcomes were also compared with (c) speech accuracy measured by SLPs as the percentage of consonants correct in syllable initial position (PCCI) using the Picture Naming Task of the Computer Articulation Instrument.
Results: Statistical analysis revealed that young children in the SSD group perceived their speech and communication differently than children in the TD group. Only in the SSD group was there a moderate positive correlation between speech accuracy and intelligibility in context and only a weak correlation with the child’s perception of speech and communication. Parents’ and children’s perceptions were weakly correlated.
Conclusion: Information on children’s perception of their own speech is complementary to information obtained from the parents and SLPs’ formal assessment of speech accuracy. To fully understand the impact of SSD it is therefore important to actively elicit and include children’s perspectives on speech and communication.

Speech and language therapists' insights into severity of speech sound disorders in children for developing the Speech Sound Disorder Severity Construct

Congratulations to Anniek Van Doornik, my PhD student at Utrecht University in The Netherlands, who has just had this paper from her PhD accepted for publication:

Van Doornik, A., Welbie, M., McLeod, S., & Gerrits, E., Terband, H. (2025, in press). Speech and language therapists' insights into severity of speech sound disorders in children for developing the Speech Sound Disorder Severity Construct. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders.

Abstract
Background: Children with speech sound disorders (SSD) are at higher risk of communication breakdown, but the impact of having an SSD may vary from child to child. Determining severity of SSD helps SLTs to recognise the extent of the problem and to identify and prioritise children who require intervention.
Aims: This study aimed to identify severity factors for SSD in order to develop a multifactorial Speech Sound Disorder Severity Construct (SSDSC) using speech-language therapists’ (SLTs’) views and the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF).
Method: In an explorative five-staged qualitative study, the research question was answered: “How do SLTs determine the severity of speech sound disorders in children?”. A total of 91 SLTs from the Netherlands participated in data collection and analysis. The iterative process included three different qualitative research methodologies (thematic analysis, constructivist grounded theory and content analysis) to ensure validation of the results by means of method triangulation.
Results: SLTs considered 9 themes: intelligibility, speech accuracy, persistence, the child’s perception, impact, communicative participation, concomitant factors, professional point of view, and environmental factors. The themes were summarised in three main severity factors: (I) Speech accuracy, (II) The child’s perception of the impact of their speech, and (III) Intelligibility in communication. Other severity factors were concomitant factors and impact. Expertise and support were identified as facilitators or barriers that may worsen or relieve the severity of SSD.
Conclusions: This study highlights the need for SLTs to rethink how they think about severity as a simplistic construct reflecting only speech accuracy. It is recommended that a broader holistic approach to measuring severity is adopted.

What this paper adds:
What is already known on the subject
Although there are several proposals aiming to define the severity of SSD, the extent to which these align with clinical practice is not well understood. In recent years, speech accuracy and other factors such as intelligibility have been suggested as possible indicators of SSD severity. Flipsen et al (2005) concluded that experienced clinicians evaluated the number, type and consistency of speech errors as well as intelligibility, considering articulatory competence at both the segmental and whole word level when determining severity. Enderby and John (2015) developed ICF-based Therapy Outcome Measures (TOMs), including a TOM for phonological disorder. Although there is evidence in the literature that multiple factors should be considered when determining severity, there is still no clear guidance on this. In this discussion, the perspective of SLTs is an important contribution to the development of a measure of severity, but is lacking in the known literature.  

What this paper adds to existing knowledge
As a first step, this study examines SLT’s perspectives on how they define and measure severity of SSD, and determines how those views align with the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) in order to develop a severity construct that can be further tested and validated. Using the views of SLTs and the ICF, this qualitative study resulted in the multifactorial Speech Sound Disorder Severity Construct (SSDSC).

What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work?
The practical experience of SLTs, combined with what is known from the literature, provides insight into the different factors that may contribute to severity of SSD. These factors may be considered in developing a measure of SSD severity in the future.

Leadership and retention in early childhood education

Congratulations to Belinda Downey who has just had this paper published from her PhD: 

Downey, B., Letts, W., Gibbs, L., & McLeod, S. (2024). Leadership and retention in early childhood education. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 49(4), 343-357. https://doi.org/10.1177/18369391241286935 

Here is the abstract: 

Global early childhood education workforce shortages have highlighted the importance of recruitment and retention. The development of effective leadership has not been a retention policy focus even though effective leadership has been identified as an important driver for improving working conditions and supporting educator retention. The aim of this research was to investigate what factors affect retention focussing on retention challenges for leaders in an under researched context. Participants were 34 early childhood educators in the Northern Territory of Australia. A constructivist grounded theory methodology framed the research and the data analysis, and a constant comparative method was used to generate categories. The lack of learning on leadership, coupled with competing priorities, were identified as critical factors that contribute to increased attrition. However, informal mentoring was found to support both the positional and emerging leaders, increasing the probability of their retention regardless of their access to leadership development.