Week 3 of the Tasmanian Kinder Speech Census begins

 At the beginning of week 3 of our Tasmanian Kinder Speech Census we have:

• 32 schools
• 1,203 Kinder students
• 889 parent consent forms returned 
• LOTS of children who have assented to participating in our research and who have told us how they feel about their speech 
• LOTS of children assessed using the International Speech Screener (ISS). I personally have assessed 208 children so far :)
• 63 control children assessed with the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP)

Another day face-to-face with Kinder students in CET schools

The rest of the week I have been assessing the students and undertaking data analysis via Zoom because I am no longer in Tasmania. 

Thinking in Action: Strengthening Clinical Reasoning to Deliver High-Impact, Individualized Interventions

Today our Children's Voices Centre Visiting Scholar - Professor Lynn Williams  - presented a whole day workshop titled "Thinking in Action: Strengthening Clinical Reasoning to Deliver High-Impact, Individualized Interventions".

We had 16 people attend in person in Bathurst, 65 people attend session 1 online, 96 people attend session 2 online, and 62 people attend session 3 online!   

9:30-11:30 | Session 1: Thinking in Action: Strengthening Clinical Reasoning to Deliver High-Impact, Individualized Interventions (2 hours)
11:30-12:00 | COFFEE BREAK
12:00-1:00 | Session 2: The Evolution of the Multiple Oppositions Approach: From Theory to Global Practice (1 hour)
1:00-2:00 | LUNCH (Own expense at CSU café or BYO) 
2:00-3:00 | Session 3: Thinking in Action (1 hour)

Professor A. Lynn Williams, PhD, CCC-SLP 
A. Lynn Williams is Professor in the Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology at East Tennessee State University (ETSU), USA. She was founding Dean of ETSU’s College of Health Sciences, and 2021 President of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). An internationally recognized expert in speech sound disorders, she has led innovative interprofessional education initiatives and currently serves as Vice President of the National Academies of Practice, advancing collaboration to improve education, research, and patient care.

Sessions 1 and 3: 
Thinking in Action: Strengthening Clinical Reasoning to Deliver High-Impact, Individualized Interventions
Clinical reasoning is the bridge between research and real-world practice that allows clinicians to honour evidence-based interventions while adapting to each client’s needs. These interactive sessions will explore how clinical reasoning guides moment-to-moment decision-making during intervention, particularly in modifying teaching moments such as cues and feedback, and how clinicians may “tailor it, mix it, or wing it.” Using case examples, we will unpack the critical differences between tailoring, hybrid methods, and eclecticism, and their impact on treatment fidelity and outcomes. Attendees will gain practical strategies to strengthen their clinical reasoning skills, maintain intervention fidelity, and elevate confidence in delivering effective, individualized care.

Session 2: 
The Evolution of the Multiple Oppositions Approach: From Theory to Global Practice
First described in Williams (2000), the Multiple Oppositions approach offers a contrastive intervention for children with severe speech sound disorders. Grounded in systemic phonology, it targets multiple error sounds simultaneously to maximize change in a child’s speech system. This one-hour presentation will chart its development over 25 years from theoretical origins to adoption across languages. Participants will gain practical insights into applying the approach to improve intelligibility and participation for children.
Williams, A. L. (2000). Multiple oppositions: Theoretical foundations for an alternative contrastive intervention approach. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 9, 282–288. https://doi.org/10.1044/1058-0360.0904.282

Some of the online audience

Speech-language pathologists brought along their books for Lynn to sign

International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children's Speech meeting in Patras, Greece

This morning members of the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children's Speech met for 3 hours in Patras, Greece to advance our tutorial paper titled "Speech interventions for multilingual children who do not speak the same language(s) as the speech-language pathologist". We began this paper a number of years ago, and we were able to progress the work significantly this morning. Our thoughtful and robust discussions explored ways to work with children and families in different contexts, countries, cultures and languages. We look forward to sending an updated draft to the rest of the panel members in a month's time, so that we can finalise and submit the paper. 

 

Planning our speech pathology screening clinic for Indigenous families

This morning our research team met at the Orange Community Health Centre to plan our speech screening days in April that will be part of our research with Indigenous children. What an informative and useful planning session.

Sharynne, Susan Smith, Sarah Bartlett, Katrina, Emily-Jane Woodhead

Accepted journal article - Methods of Diagnosing Speech Sound Disorders in Multilingual Children

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.

Speech assessment tools: Updating the Multilingual Children's Speech website

We are systematically updating the Multilingual Children's Speech website. Today we have uploaded the updated Speech Assessment Tools page:

https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments/speech-assessment-tools

The page now has 379 speech assessment tools.

Previously (yesterday) there were 117 speech assessments on the Speech Assessment Tools page*. 

There are 262 NEW assessments on the page (compared with yesterday). 

These have been added by collaborating with colleagues, mostly authors of The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World. Thank you everyone for your generosity to make this website such a useful resource. 

Thank you especially to Dr Helen L. Blake who is working with me on this project and the fantastic CSU webteam: Boram Kwon, Alex Moore, Lindsey Ting,  Kelly Bull, Amber Murray.

*63 were on the Multilingual Children's Speech website Sept 2024 (not in OUP chapter) + 54 were both on the website and in the OUP chapter (some have been updated)

Brazilian Portuguese speech assessments and resources

While in Brazil I was able to purchase two of Brazilian Portuguese speech assessments and discuss their development and use with the authors:

• ABFW: Teste de Linguagem Infantilm - Prof Haydee Fiszbein Wertzner is the author of the speech subtest - and the "W" in the title acknowledges her contribution. It is important to purchase the complete test because the book and the box of cards are sold separately as well
  
• Complete test - https://www.booktoy.com.br/index.php?route=product/product&path=57&product_id=749
• Manual - https://profono.com.br/produto/abfw-teste-de-linguagem-infantil/
• Stimulus cards - https://profono.com.br/produto/fichario-abfw/
  
• TESF: Teste de Estimulabilidade dos Sons da Fala - https://www.editorabooktoy.com.br/tesf-teste-de-estimulabilidade-dos-sons-da-fala-12276 - Luciana de Oliveira Pagan-Neves, Danira Tavares Francisco, and Haydée Fiszbein Wertzner (other authors are Márcia Mathias de Castro and Tatiane Faria Barrozo). This assessment considers stimulability - and references Glaspey and Stoel-Gammon's work.
  

Authors of TESF Luciana de Oliveira Pagan-Neves, Danira Tavares Francisco, and Haydée Fiszbein Wertzner

Speech assessment component of the ABFW: Teste de Linguagem Infantilm

 Some of the other resources available at the FORL conference from BookToy https://www.booktoy.com.br/

Our VietSpeech team is writing a lot of chapters

The work of our VietSpeech team (https://www.csu.edu.au/research/vietspeech/overview) continues to have impact across the world. We have been invited to write a number of different book chapters based on our research. We are currently working on these chapters:

• Tran, V. H., Margetson, K., Pham, B., Verdon, S., McLeod, S., Blake, H. L., & Faulks, S. (in preparation). Vietnamese English. In Y. Holt, K. N. Washington, & E. Babatsouli (Eds.) Linguistic varieties in North America: A primer for speech and language practitioners. Multilingual Matters.
• Margetson, K., McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (in preparation). Diagnosing speech sound disorders in multilingual children who speak Vietnamese and English. In K. N. Washington, K. Crowe, T Másdóttir (Eds.). Diagnosing speech sound disorders in multilingual children. Routledge.

These chapters have just been accepted for publication:

• Margetson, K., McLeod, S., Verdon, S., Tran, V. H., & Phạm, B. (2025). English + Vietnamese speech development. In S. McLeod (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of speech development in languages of the world. Oxford University Press.
• Phạm, B. & Margetson, K., McLeod, S. + Tran, V. H. & Verdon, S. (2025). Vietnamese speech development. In S. McLeod (Ed.). The Oxford handbook of speech development in languages of the world. Oxford University Press.

Dr Van Tran, Prof Sharynne McLeod, Dr Helen Blake,
Dr Ben Phạm, Dr Kate Margetson, A/Prof Sarah Verdon

These chapters have been published in 2024:

• Tran, V. H., McLeod, S., Verdon, S., Margetson, K., & Phạm, B. (2024). Vietnamese-Australian families: Children’s language competence and home language maintenance. In L. Mahony, S. McLeod, A. Salamon, & J. Dwyer (Eds.), Early childhood voices: Children, families, professionals (pp. 135-150). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56484-0_1015 
• Margetson, K., McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (2024). Diagnosing speech sound disorder in bilingual Vietnamese-English-speaking children: Are English-only assessments sufficient? In E. Babatsouli (Ed.). Multilingual acquisition and learning: A ecosystemic view to diversity. (pp. 217-245). John Benjamins Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.67.08mar

European Portuguese speech assessments

It is so helpful to travel to different countries to learn more about the clinical tools used to assess children's speech. Here are some of the European Portuguese speech assessments that I need to add to the Multilingual Children's Speech webpage.   

• Paediatric Automatic Phonological Analysis Tools (APAT): https://acsa.web.ua.pt/FAFA.htm (free)
• Teste Fonético-Fonológico: https://edubox.pt/terapia-da-fala?lang=pt
• Rastreio de Linguagem e Fala (RALF) (screening): https://edubox.pt/terapia-da-fala?lang=pt
  

I was able to purchase one of them for my international collection of speech assessments.

ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) scheme

Today I met with colleagues across Australia to discuss the potential development of an application for the ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) scheme.

The LIEF scheme enables higher education researchers to participate in cooperative initiatives so that expensive infrastructure, equipment and facilities can be shared between higher education organisations and also with industry. The scheme also fosters collaboration through its support of the cooperative use of international or national research facilities. The LIEF scheme objectives are to: support excellent basic and applied research and research training through the acquisition of research equipment and infrastructure and access to national and international research facilities; and encourage Eligible Organisations to develop collaborative arrangements with other Eligible Organisations and/or Partner Organisations for the acquisition and use of research equipment and infrastructure or access to national and international facilities. The intended outcomes of the LIEF scheme are: enhanced scale and focus of research in areas of existing and/or emerging research strength; and research infrastructure for the broader research community. (from ARC website)

Speech and teeth: Working with Caitlin in three countries

I am co-supervising Caitlin Hurley's research for her Doctorate of Clinical Dentistry that she is undertaking at the University of Western Australia. Over the past two months we have worked together in three countries: Australia, Austria and New Zealand.

Analysing speech data at The University of Auckland, NZ

PEEPS Foreword

I have been invited to write the Foreword and Appendix containing speech acquisition data for the PEEPS and today I received the page proofs:

Williams, A. L., & Stoel-Gammon, C. (2023). Profiles of Early Expressive  Phonological Skills™ (PEEPS™). Paul H. Brookes Publishing. 

Part of my foreword states:

To date, there have been few tools available to speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to assess young children’s emerging speech skills. The Profiles of Early Expressive Phonological Skills™ (PEEPS) has been designed for young children (18–36 months of age) who have small vocabularies and limited inventories of speech sounds. PEEPS™ is a unique evidence-based speech assessment and is a welcome addition to SLPs’ almost empty toolboxes for young children...The authors of PEEPS™ are eminent authorities on children’s speech and have undertaken extensive research that underpins their conceptualization and operationalization of this unique tool. They have spent more than 15 years developing PEEPS™, and the world has been waiting...

First participant recruited

I was so excited to receive your email this evening:
"Exciting update ... first participant recruited! ... I’m excited we’re going to get this started... 😊

This is so exciting! Caitlin Hurley is about to begin her data collection for her doctoral research. I’m really looking forward to delving into the results and discovering new knowledge<23072662 student.uwa.edu.au=""> as w<23072662 student.uwa.edu.au="">e begin to scientifically understand the association between speech and dentition.

Holistic communication assessment for young children with cleft palate using the ICF-CY

The following manuscript has been accepted for publication.
Cronin, A., McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (2020, in press May). Holistic communication assessment for young children with cleft palate using the ICF-CY. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.

It forms part of Anna's PhD thesis. Congratulations Anna!
Here is the abstract:

Purpose: Children with a cleft palate (+/- cleft lip; CP±L) can have difficulties communicating and participating in daily life, yet speech-language pathologists typically focus on speech production during routine assessments. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health: Children and Youth (ICF-CY, World Health Organization, 2007), provides a framework for holistic assessment. This paper describes holistic assessment of children with CP±L illustrated by data collected from a non-clinical sample of seven 2-to 3-year-old children, 13 parents, and 12 significant others (e.g., educators and grandparents).
Method: Data were collected during visits to participants’ homes and early childhood education and care centers. Assessment tools applicable to domains of the ICF-CY were used to collect and analyze data. Child participants’ Body Functions including speech, language, and cognitive development were assessed using screening and standardized assessments. Participants’ Body Structures were assessed via oral motor examination, case history questionnaires, and observation. Participants’ Activities and Participation, and Environmental and Personal Factors, were examined through case history questionnaires, interviews with significant others, parent-report measures and observations.
Results: Valuable insights can be gained from undertaking holistic speech-language pathology assessments of children with CP±L. Using multiple tools allowed for triangulation of data and privileging different viewpoints, to better understand the children and their contexts. Several children demonstrated speech error patterns outside of what is considered cleft speech characteristics which underscores the importance of broader assessment.  
Conclusion: SLPs can consider incorporating evaluation of all components and contextual factors of the ICF-CY when assessing and working with young children with CP±L to inform intervention and management practices.

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention, Orlando, FL

This week, members of the SLM team are attending the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention, in Orlando, FL. There were almost 3,000 papers and posters presented over the 3 days and 15,000+ attendees.
Here are the seminars/papers we are presenting:

• McLeod, S. & Crowe, K. - Children’s consonant acquisition across languages. Invited 1-hour seminar. 
• Baker, E., Williams, A. L., McCauley, R. J. & McLeod, S. - A taxonomy of phonological intervention to guide and teach clinical decision-making and fidelity of implementation. 1-hour seminar. 
• Blake, H. L., McLeod, S. & Verdon, S. - Intelligibility Enhancement assessment and intervention for multilingual university students. Technical paper. 
• Brown, M. I., Wang, C., & McLeod, S. - Parent-child book reading impacts academic achievement in Grade 3. Technical paper. 

Alyssa Boucher (Boston University), Sharynne McLeod (CSU), Kate Crowe (CSU/Iceland University), Michelle Brown (CSU), Sheila Deogtardi (Macquarie Uni) at ASHA

Sharynne, Karla Washington, Kate Crowe, Thora Masdottir, Helen Blake and Michelle Brown at the Researcher Academic Town Meeting (Wednesday night)

Sharynne, Rebecca McCauley and Lynn Williams about to present their 1-hour seminar
(Elise Baker presented via voice-over)

Speech Sound Disorders Researchers: Sharynne, Rebecca McCauley, Shelley Velleman, Greg Lof, Kelly Farquharson, Francois Brosseau Lapre, SLP, Brian Goldstein, Katy Cabbage, Jill Hoover, Sarah Masso

Sharynne and Kate Crowe presented an invited 1-hour seminar (and gave out free handouts)

Helen Blake about to present her paper

Dr Michelle Brown about to present her second paper

Michelle Brown, Sheila Degotadi, Sharynne, Lynn Williams (2021 ASHA President), Kate Crowe

John Bernthal and Sharynne catch up every year at the ASHA convention.
Sharynne is currently updating a book chapter in the 9th edition of John's book

Sharynne, Shelley Velleman, Amy Glaspey, Brian Goldstein

Sharynne, Michelle, Kate and Helen sampling Harry Potter's butter beer (100% sugar!)

Helen, Sharynne, Lynn, Michelle, Kate and Marie Ireland at the Harry Potter World ASHA closing party

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)

Analysing Fijian children's speech

Today Holly McAlister and I spent almost 3 hours working on our data frameworks and coding systems for analysing Fijian children's speech (data from Dr Suzanne Hopf's PhD). We have permission from Dr Elise Baker to adapt the CHIRPA and are using the following paper for advice on dialects

Hopf, S. C., McLeod, S., & Geraghty, P. (2016). A contrastive analysis of the phonologies of two Fiji English dialects: A diagnostic guide for speech-language pathologists. Speech, Language, and Hearing, 19(2), 96-104. doi:10.1080/2050571X.2015.1133037

We are also using protocols from my work in the VietSpeech study and the Jamaican study.

Holly's honours is supervised by Dr Suzanne Hopf and myself. I am looking forward to finding out the results (next year after the transcriptions and analyses are complete).

Presentation of the 2017 Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research Editor's Award

Today the Sound Start Study team was presented the 2017 Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research Editor's Award (Speech) at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) convention in Boston, MA. Dr Kate Crowe accepted the award during the Researcher-Academic Town Meeting (RATM) and it will be mentioned during the main awards ceremony at Convention.

"An Editor’s Award is truly a high honor, with selection limited to the most impactful works that meet the highest quality standards in research design and presentation." 

Kate receiving the award with Sharynne, Sue, Sarah and Yvonne online (Elise was online earlier)

At the ASHA Award ceremony in Boston: Bronwyn Hemsley, Helen Blake, Thora Masdottir, Karla Washington, Kate Crowe, Nicole McGill

We are able to celebrate the award in Sydney, Australia with Marc Fey, who received the 2017 Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research Editor's Award (Language)

Jane McCormack, Sarah Masso, Sharynne, Sandy and Marc Fey

 Here are the details of our article:
Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluating the Effectiveness of Computer-Assisted Intervention Delivered by Educators for Children With Speech Sound Disorders
Sharynne McLeod, Elise Baker, Jane McCormack, Yvonne Wren, Sue Roulstone, Kathryn Crowe, Sarah Masso, Paul White, and Charlotte Howland
Free download: https://jslhr.pubs.asha.org/article.aspx?articleid=2643351

The CSU media release is here: http://news.csu.edu.au/latest-news/education/teacher-education/international-award-for-best-paper-in-top-speech-pathology-journal 

All of the award winners are listed here: https://academy.pubs.asha.org/2018/09/2018-asha-journals-awards/

Here are the other journal award winners (we know and collaborate with a number of these authors)
American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology (Editor-in-Chief: Julie Barkmeier-Kraemer)
Investigating the Adequacy of Intervention Descriptions in Recent Speech-Language Pathology Literature: Is Evidence From Randomized Trials Useable?
Arabella Ludemann, Emma Power, and Tammy C. Hoffmann
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research–Speech Section (Editor-in-Chief: Julie Liss)
Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluating the Effectiveness of Computer-Assisted Intervention Delivered by Educators for Children With Speech Sound Disorders
Sharynne McLeod, Elise Baker, Jane McCormack, Yvonne Wren, Sue Roulstone, Kathryn Crowe, Sarah Masso, Paul White, and Charlotte Howland
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research–Language Section (Editor-in-Chief: Sean Redmond)
Do the Hard Things First: A Randomized Controlled Trial Testing the Effects of Exemplar Selection on Generalization Following Therapy for Grammatical Morphology
Amanda Jean Owen Van Horne, Marc Fey, and Maura Curran
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research–Hearing Section (Editor-in-Chief: Frederick Gallun)
Speech Recognition in Adults With Cochlear Implants: The Effects of Working Memory, Phonological Sensitivity, and Aging
Aaron C. Moberly, Michael S. Harris, Lauren Boyce, and Susan Nittrouer
Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools (Editor-in-Chief: Shelley Gray)
Interactive Book Reading to Accelerate Word Learning by Kindergarten Children With Specific Language Impairment: Identifying an Adequate Intensity and Variation in Treatment Response
Holly L. Storkel, Krista Voelmle, Veronica Fierro, Kelsey Flake, Kandace K. Fleming, and Rebecca Swinburne Romine
American Journal of Audiology (Editor-in-Chief: Sumit Dhar)
The Effects of Service-Delivery Model and Purchase Price on Hearing-Aid Outcomes in Older Adults: A Randomized Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trial
Larry E. Humes, Sara E. Rogers, Tera M. Quigley, Anna K. Main, Dana L. Kinney, and Christine Herring

Screening children’s speech: The impact of imitated elicitation and word position

This morning the following paper was accepted for publication:
McLeod, S. & Masso, S. (2018, in press July). Screening children’s speech: The impact of imitated elicitation and word position. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.
Here is the abstract

Purpose: Diagnostic decision-making is influenced by the attributes of assessments. In order to propose time-efficient protocols for screening children’s speech this study aimed to determine whether eliciting imitated responses and analyzing productions in different word positions resulted in different levels of consonant accuracy.
Method: Participants were 267 English-speaking preschool-aged children in the Sound Start Study whose parents were concerned about their speech. They were assessed using the International Speech Screener (ISS, McLeod, 2013) using either imitated or spontaneous elicitation. Productions were compared with an established diagnostic assessment of speech accuracy (Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology, DEAP-Phonology, Dodd et al., 2002).
Results: Participants’ performance on the ISS was significantly correlated with performance on the DEAP-Phonology. Eliciting imitated productions on the ISS (M = 2:18 mins, SD = 0:59) took significantly less time than spontaneous productions (M = 6:32 mins, SD = 2:34). There was no significant difference in accuracy of imitated versus spontaneous productions in word-initial position; however, consonants were significantly less accurate in spontaneous than imitated productions in other word positions. Overall, participants had significantly lower consonant accuracy in word-initial position than within word or word-final positions. Examination of the influence of word position on test discrimination, using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses, revealed acceptable test discrimination for percentage of consonants correct across word positions.
Conclusions: This research supports using imitated elicitation and analysis of percentage of consonants correct in word-initial position as a time-efficient procedure when screening the speech of English-speaking preschool children.

Impact: Speech sound disorders in preschool and school-age children

The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) have just launched a journal self-study course for their members titled "Speech Sound Disorders in Preschool and School-Age Children (WEB3250)". It contains learning based around four journal articles, and two of the four were written by our team, with a third being written by our colleagues Yvonne Wren and Sue Roulstone from the UK. It is very exciting to have had our work selected by ASHA and will increase the impact of our work across the US and the world. The selected papers in the self-study course are:

1. Stimulus Characteristics of Single-Word Tests of Children's Speech Sound Production - Toby Macrae 
2. Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial Evaluating the Effectiveness of Computer-Assisted Intervention Delivered by Educators for Children With Speech Sound Disorders - Sharynne McLeod, Elise Baker, Jane McCormack, Yvonne Wren, Sue Roulstone, Kathryn Crowe, Sarah Masso, Paul White, and Charlotte Howland 
3. Polysyllable Speech Accuracy and Predictors of Later Literacy Development in Preschool Children With Speech Sound Disorders - Sarah Masso, Elise Baker, Sharynne McLeod, and Cen Wang 
4. Prevalence and Predictors of Persistent Speech Sound Disorder at Eight Years Old: Findings From a Population Cohort Study - Yvonne Wren, Laura L. Miller, Tim J. Peters, Alan Emond, and Sue Roulstone 

Here is the summary of the course from the ASHA website:

Children with speech sound disorders make up a large part of the caseload for many SLPs who work with preschool and school-age children. Speech sound disorders not only affect a child’s ability to communicate at a young age but also may lead to later speech and literacy difficulties. This journal self-study explores issues related to managing speech sound disorders, including assessment and treatment options. It also includes articles that identify predictors of future speech and literacy problems. Clinicians can use this information to help identify appropriate assessment tools and potential treatment options, as well as counsel parents and teachers of children who may be at risk for continuing speech and academic difficulties.