Kate's visit to Bathurst (via the Blue Mountains)

Kate Crowe (RIPPLE Research Fellow) is visiting me in Bathurst this week. We have a very long list of tasks to accomplish, but managed to begin her visit by enjoying the scenery in the Blue Mountains.

Kate sewed an International Phonetic Alphabet sampler as a gift to me!

Anna's visit to the US during her Churchill Fellowship

Anna Cronin's Churchill Fellowship is well underway. So far she has visited New Zealand and Brazil. This week she has been in Laramie, USA visiting Dr. Mary Hardin-Jones. Next week she heads to Salt Lake City, Utah to visit Dr. Kathy Chapman. Anna has written: "So far the trip has been going really well and I feel like I'm learning so much! Every centre has been so different and people have been so generous with their time, knowledge and expertise."

Mary and Anna in Laramie

Anna at the Delicate Arch in Moab

Early Years Connect webinar

Today I presented an Early Years Connect webinar to 256 early childhood education professionals. "Early Years Connect is a professional development package which has been designed to support Queensland early childhood education and care (ECEC) educators working with children with complex additional needs. This includes children with disability, significant development delay and complex social, emotional and behavioural needs." A list of all the planned webinars is here. My webinar is here.
Here is their description of my presentation

Title: Communication strategies for children with speech, language and communication needs

Description: Every child can benefit from high-quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) - if only we understand how to meet their needs. How can you support the inclusion of children with speech, language and communication needs in your early childhood education and care service? What communication strategies can you use with children to build their skills and sense of belonging?

Join Sharynne McLeod, Professor of Speech and Language Acquisition at

Charles Sturt University, to learn how to support children with speech, language and communication needs.

The webinar will explain:

*       the critical role of communication in relationships and learning

*       common communication difficulties

*       strategies for building communication skills.

This webinar is free for all staff, approved providers and governance bodies of Queensland-based ECEC services, including long day care, kindergarten, family day care and outside school hours care.

Fulbright Senior Scholar's visit to CSU

Over the past few days we have been honoured to have Professor David Lee, Fulbright Senior Scholar, and his wife Heidi visiting Charles Sturt University. His visit was supported by the School of Teacher Education and the Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education (RIPPLE). Professor Lee is a member of the faculty of the University of Miami and his Fulbright Scholarship is to The University of Sydney during 2016. 

While at CSU, Professor Lee presented a public lecture titled: Mindfulness: What is all the Fuss About? OR Medical and Public Health Applications of Mindfulness Practices. The lecture was simultaneously broadcasted to 4+ cities in Australia and Fiji. He also presented a session for people interested in applying for the Fulbright scheme, and met with Vice Chancellor Andy Vann.

Professor Lee and members of his public lecture audience

 Here are more details about his work:

Dr. Lee is a tenured Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences within the Miller School of Medicine. Currently, he is the Project Director of the Florida Cancer Data System Cancer Registry, the Co-Founder and Leader of the University of Miami Mind-Body Medical Workgroup (http://www.umindbody.org), and the Director of the Department of Public Health Sciences Graduate Programs.  Dr. Lee is also a member of the National Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Advisory Council at National Institutes of Health.  He has published book chapters and monographs, over 200 peer reviewed journal articles as well as other works and abstracts.  Dr. Lee has been involved in the mentoring of students including service on 25 dissertation committees Additionally, students are active members of his research teams contributing to the 50+ student-led publications in leading biomedical journals including the American Journal of Public Health, Preventive Medicine, Cancer, Circulation, Diabetes Care, and the American Journal of Ophthalmology. He is a chronic disease and occupational epidemiologist and has been continuously funded as Principal Investigator on various grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention since 1993. Dr. Lee’s current research interests include: public health applications of mindfulness practices (e.g., yoga, meditation) for the prevention and management of chronic disease, enhancing the health of the US workforce, population approaches toward the reduction of eye disease, and cancer surveillance and prevention.

Child Language Teaching and Therapy editorial board meeting

This evening, I attended (via video conference) the Child Language Teaching and Therapy editorial board meeting held in London. Some interesting facts from the meeting included:

• The 2014 Impact Factor was 1.025, ranking the journal 44th out of 172 titles in the Linguistics JCR (Q2) and 20th out of 39 titles in the Education, Special JCR (Q3)
• The acceptance rate was 26% in 2015
• Maggie Vance is stepping down as co-editor of CLTT after 9 years of dedication to the journal
• Vicky Joffe will be the new co-editor from July 2016, joining Judy Clegg 
• The article downloads have increased from 2014 to 2015

More than words and signs: Vocabulary development and children with hearing loss

Yesterday Kate Crowe gave an online workshop titled "More than words and signs: Vocabulary development and children with hearing loss" to teachers of the deaf and speech pathologists who registered through the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children (RIDBC) Renwick Centre.

ASHA online conference on intelligibility

From 6-18 April the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association is hosting an online conference titled: "Improving intelligibility in children with speech sound disorders". I am one of 15 invited presenters and my pre-recorded 1-hour presentation is titled "Measuring intelligibility with different listeners: The Intelligibility in Context Scale". The attendees can download the presentations and handouts, discuss the presentations online with the attendees, and participate in live chat sessions with the presenters. There are over 600 people registered. It is going to be an exciting event.

Here is the description of my presentation

Few assessments consider children's intelligibility with different listeners. The Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) is a parent-report measure for considering children's intelligibility with seven different communicative partners. The ICS is available for free and has been translated into 60 languages. The tool has been normed on more than 800 English-speaking preschool-age children who were considered usually or always understood by parents, immediate family members, and teachers but only sometimes by strangers. This session will discuss use of the ICS within SLP practice and how it fits in with other methods for assessing intelligibility in children. The session will also explore the evidence underpinning the use of the ICS as an assessment tool for children who speak English or other languages.
After completing this session, you will be able to:
administer and score the ICS
explain the current and emerging evidence base supporting use of the ICS

Building a New Life in Australia (BNLA) data analysis

This week Helen Blake and I are working with Laura Bennetts Kneebone at the Department of Social Services in Canberra. We are analysing data from the Building a New Life in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Humanitarian Migrants. The first wave of the BNLA draws on data from 2399 respondents from 1509 households interviewed in 2013/14. We are considering the impact of English language proficiency on migrants’ settlement and participation in Australia. We have learned that our paper based on these data has been accepted for presentation at the Australian Institute of Family Studies conference in Melbourne in July.

Laura Bennetts Kneebone, Helen Blake, Sharynne

Congratulations Kate: MSpecEd (SD) graduation

Today Kate Crowe graduated (again!). This time she graduated with a Master of Special Education (Sensory Disabilities) from the University of Newcastle.  Her degree consisted of coursework and a thesis that was titled: Professionals’ Perspectives On Spoken Language Multilingualism For Children With Hearing Loss. Congratulations Kate (again!)!

Children's Speech is almost finished

Over the past few months Elise Baker and I have been working closely with copyeditors and typesetters to finalise our new book: Children's Speech: An Evidence-Based Approach to Assessment and Intervention. We are almost finished - this weekend we have been checking the page proofs for the references and glossary. Elise has been finalizing the learning guide, assessment questions, and Powerpoint slides to accompany the book. It will be published in June. We hope it is going to be a useful resource to SLPs throughout the world.

Here is what the backcover says:

Children's Speech distills scientific evidence from around the world on sound disorders across the areas of speech acquisition, assessment, analysis, diagnosis, and intervention, and presents it with practical knowledge to prepare speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to work with children and their families. The book is guided by two contemporary frameworks that direct the successful management of speech sound disorders in children: evidence-based practice (EBP) and the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health—Children and Youth (ICF-CY). The foundation knowledge covers important topics including defining the population, types of speech sound disorders, anatomical structures, articulation and transcription of speech sounds, and theoretical foundations of speech and speech acquisition. Practical evidence-based knowledge is covered in chapters that mirror the stages of contact when working with children with speech sound disorders including assessment, analysis, goal setting, intervention principles and plans, intervention procedures, phonological interventions, motor speech interventions, and the conduct of EBP. The last chapter provides comprehensive clinical information for five clinical cases, including transcribed speech samples, case history information, assessment results and other real-life material. Throughout, readers are directed to complete clinical application tasks, drawing on the case-based information in this final chapter.
This First Edition:
Distills the world’s research on speech sound disorders across the areas of speech acquisition, assessment, analysis, diagnosis, and intervention.
International in scope.
Facilitates student learning with a number of valuable pedagogical aids.
Supports course teaching with a number of aids for instructors.

Here are the links to the book:

• US: https://www.pearsonhighered.com/program/Mc-Leod-Children-s-Speech-An-Evidence-Based-Approach-to-Assessment-and-Intervention/PGM241416.html
• UK: https://catalogue.pearsoned.co.uk/educator/product/Childrens-Speech-An-EvidenceBased-Approach-to-Assessment-and-Intervention/9780132755962.page

3000+ page views during March for Multilingual Children's Speech website

The Google analytic report has just arrived for the Multilingual Children's Speech website for the month of March 2016. During the month of March there were 3,115 page views (2,063 unique page views) from 67 different countries (in order):

United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Hong Kong, India, Philippines, Germany, Ireland, Sweden, Italy, Denmark, New Zealand, Palestine, Malaysia, China, France, Slovenia, Taiwan, Vietnam, South Africa, Greece, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, Israel, Iceland, Luxembourg, Malta, United Arab Emirates, Finland, Indonesia, Jordan, Poland, Turkey, Brazil, Czech Republic, Egypt, South Korea, Kuwait, Norway, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Austria, Brunei, Botswana, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Iraq, Japan, Kenya, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Mexico, Oman

The most popular pages were:
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/ics
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments
http://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acquisition
 

Audience (by country) accessing the Multilingual Children's Speech website in March 2016

The website continues to increase in popularity. A summary of the page views from 2014 is here.

Happy St Patrick's Day

I love what I learn working amongst colleagues from different countries. Today is St Patrick's Day and one of my colleagues from Northern Ireland sent me this wish:
Mar a théann tú síos céimeanna an tsaoil, nach sínfeadh na sceilpe an treo mícheart.
“As we slide down the bannisters of life, may the splinters always point in the right direction”

Polysyllable productions in preschool children with speech sound disorders

The following article has been accepted for publication. It is a part of Sarah Masso's PhD:

Masso, S., McLeod, S., Baker, E., & McCormack, J. (2016, in press March). Polysyllable productions in preschool children with speech sound disorders: Error categories and the Framework of Polysyllable Maturity. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. Here is the abstract

Purpose: Children with speech sound disorders (SSD) find polysyllables difficult; however, routine methods of sampling and measuring speech accuracy are insufficient to describe polysyllable accuracy and maturity. This study had two aims: (1) to compare two speech production tasks and, (2) to describe polysyllable errors within the Framework of Polysyllable Maturity. Method: Ninety-three preschool children with SSD from the Sound Start Study (4;0-5;5 years) completed the Polysyllable Preschool Test (POP; Baker, 2013) and the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP-Phonology; Dodd et al., 2002). Result: Consonant accuracy was similar, but vowel accuracy was significantly different between the POP and the DEAP-Phonology. Production errors were analysed according to the seven error categories of the Word-level Analysis of Polysyllables (WAP): (1) substitution of consonants or vowels (97.8% of children demonstrated common use), (2) deletion of syllables, consonants or vowels (65.6%), (3) distortion of consonants or vowels (0.0%), (4) addition of consonants or vowels (0.0%), (5) alteration of phonotactics (77.4%), (6) alteration of timing (63.4%),  and (7) alteration of sequence (0.0%). The Framework of Polysyllable Maturity described five levels of maturity based on children’s errors. Conclusions: Polysyllable productions of preschool children with SSD can be analysed and categorised using the WAP, and interpreted using the Framework of Polysyllable Maturity.

Mehrsprachige Kinder mit Aussprachestörung: Internationales Positionspapier [Multilingual children with speech sound disorder: International position paper]

The following article has been accepted for publication and is a result of collaboration with Dr. Sandra Neumann from the Universität zu Köln (University of Cologne) in Germany.

Neumann, S., Meinusch, M., Verdon, S. & McLeod, S. (2016, in press) Mehrsprachige Kinder mit Aussprachestörung: Internationales Positionspapier [Multilingual children with speech sound disorder: International position paper], Logos. doi: 10.7345/prolog-1602084.

Here is the English version of the abstract:

Some children have speech sound disorders (SSD) regardless of whether they speak one, two, or multiple languages. Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) across the world have indicated that they may not have adequate skills and resources to provide appropriate care for multilingual children with speech sound disorders.

This paper presents the first international position paper for working with multilingual children with SSD (IEPMCS, 2012). The position paper aims to provide direction and practical strategies for SLPs and related professionals working with children who are multilingual and/or multicultural, and to inform governments and policy makers in health care systems to provide optimal care internationally.

The position paper was developed in a five-step procedure by the International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech/IEPMCS) comprising 57 researchers of speech-language pathology during face-to-face discussion (with 14 members) and additional online-discussions with additional participants.

A position paper of 5 pages was published, that incorporates the components of the ICF-CY and reflects the following contents: definitions, objectives in the framework of the ICF-CY (WHO, 2007), identified challenges to provide culturally competent and evidence-based services to multilingual children with speech sound disorders and recommended best practice.

The current position paper gives Germany guidance for best practice when working with children with SSD and their parents in a culturally and linguistically appropriate way. To implement the paper in research and practice will be an important goal for the future.

Lecturing CSU's dentistry students

Today I provided a 2-hour lecture to the CSU dentistry students. I discussed the role of a speech pathologist, guidelines for typical speech and language development in children as well as reasons for referral, and showed them some electropalatography and ultrasound images of tongue/palate contact. The students attended the lecture via videoconference in locations across the state: Bathurst, Orange, Albury, Port Macquarie, Wagga, Dubbo, Sydney, and 13 were on the phone in these and other locations. I enjoy talking with dentistry students, since there are many synergies with our work as speech pathologists.

Sarah's SPSS PhD visit

This week Sarah Masso was in Bathurst to work with Audrey Wang and myself on her next PhD paper. Sarah currently is exploring change in preschoolers' polysyllable maturity over 3 time points. Audrey worked with Sarah on her data using SPSS, and together they imputed data and statistically described change over time. During the visit Sarah also supported Ben's data entry and analysis, and we celebrated Sarah's PhD birthday. It was a very productive week.

Sarah and Audrey

Sharynne, Sarah, and Ben

Planning for 2030

Speech Pathology Australia is hosting a series of events titled Speech Pathology 2030 - Making futures happen. The purpose is "to engage members of the profession in the development of a shared vision for how the profession will successfully respond to change over the next decade and beyond". Conversations are being held across Australia including at CSU. Last week Sarah Masso co-hosted an event at CSU Homebush, and this week Chris Plant has invited me to participate in an event at CSU Albury. The Border Mail news story is here. Last week I also participated in an event with Life Members and Fellows. It is exciting to listen to colleagues dreams and aspirations for the future.

SPA2030 conversation via Adobe Connect
between CSU Albury and Bathurst

Anna's Churchill Fellowship begins

Anna Cronin, my newest PhD student, will embark on her Churchill Fellowship in less than two weeks. She will be visiting sites in New Zealand (Auckland), Brazil (Bauru), US (Atlanta, St Louis, Laramie, Salt Lake City), and Denmark (Copenhagen). The topic of her Fellowship is "The optimal management of speech problems in toddlers with cleft palate". The announcement of Anna's award is here. Enjoy your Fellowship Anna, and we look forward to hearing about all you have learned.

Welcome Franklin!

Today I had the honour of meeting the newest member of our research community: Franklin. He was born last week and the whole family are doing really well. I passed on the congratulatory messages from our research student community, CSU, RIPPLE, SOTE, and the International Expert Panel. Congratulations! (Thanks Sarah for allowing me to hold him for so long and to share this photo.)

Sarah Verdon, 1 week old Franklin, and lucky Sharynne

Australian-American Fulbright Commission Scholar Showcase and Presentation Dinner

Last night the Australian-American Fulbright Commission Scholar Showcase and Presentation Dinner was held in Melbourne. Dr Kate Crowe was presented as one of the 46 2016 Fulbright Australian Scholars by His Excellency John Berry, Ambassador of the USA to Australia and Professor Don DeBats, Chair of the Australian-American Fulbright Commission Board. Charles Sturt University was a silver sponsor of the evening, and was represented by Vice Chancellor Andy Vann, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research, Development and Industry) Mary Kelly. Kate's family and friends were also in attendance to celebrate her accomplishment. More details are here and a video is here.

2016 Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholars with His Excellency John Berry,
the Ambassador of the USA to Australia and Professor Don DeBats

Kate with VC Andy Vann, DVC Mary Kelly, her family and friends