Friends and collaborators at the ASHA convention in Florida

One of the best parts of attending the American Speech-Language-Hearing Convention each year is meeting up with friends and collaborators. We do a lot of work throughout the year on email - but lots more gets done face-to-face. Here are a few people I enjoyed speaking with this year.

ABOVE: Brian Goldstein (US), Lemmietta McNeilly (ASHA), Sharynne

BELOW: Larry Shriberg, Gregg Loff, Sharynne, Peter Flipsen

Françoise Brosseau-Lapré (US), Arlene Pietranton (CEO, ASHA), Gina Olwoch (ASHA), Sharynne

Sharynne, Carol To (Hong Kong), Elise Baker (Australia)

Bilingual SLI assessments - European Union project presented at ASHA

One of the invited sessions at ASHA was
"A European Union project to develop assessments for language impairments in multilingual societies". It was presented by:

• Sharon Armon-Lotem (Israel)
• Seyhun Topbas (Turkey)
• Helen Grech (Malta)
• Carol Westby (US)

Here is the abstract:

This session was developed by the Convention Program Committee to share outcomes of the COST/ IS0804 EU networking and collaboration project from 30 countries conducted to develop assessments for mono/bilingual children with SLI. We will address the work carried out which shed light on the problem of identifying minority populations.

The website for the Bi-SLI project is  http://bi-sli.org/

Carol Westby (US), Sharon Armon-Lotem (Israel), Seyhun Topbas (Turkey), Helen Grech (Malta)

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

This week I am attending the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Convention in Orlando, Florida, USA. 

Brian Goldstein and I were invited to Co-chair the  Cultural and Linguistic Considerations Across the Discipline committee and it is great to see the outcome of the past year of work to review/prepare/allocate 44 hours of presentations on this topic.

SLP Conference chair Lynn Williams announcing the topic co-chairs at the opening session

While at the convention my colleagues, students and I are presenting the following papers:

• Hopf, S. C. & McLeod, S.  Cross-cultural competencies for working with children with speech and language disorders from Fiji. Invited presentation.
• McLeod, S. & Crowe, K.When are speech sounds learned? A cross-linguistic systematic review. Technical paper.
• McLeod, S. (chair) (2014, November). Beyond Spanish II: Competencies for SLPs working with children from diverse cultures. 1 hour seminar.
• McLeod, S., Harrison, L. J., Whiteford, C., & Walker, S. (2014, November). The impact of being multilingual when 4-5 years on academic and social-emotional outcomes at 8-9 years. Technical paper
• Washington, K. N., McLeod, S., McFarland, A., Weisbarth, J. (2014).  Jamaican Creole-speaking children’s expressive language, emergent literacy & communicative-participation: SLP, parent, and teacher evaluations. Technical paper.
• Weisbath, J., Washington, K. N., McLeod, S., Samms-Vaughan, M., & Devonish, H. (2014, November). Print concept development in English: Comparing Jamaican preschoolers to US ELL and monolingual English-speaking preschoolers. Poster. 



Presenters in the Beyond Spanish session: Giang Pham (Vietnamese), Christina Gildersleeve-Neumann (Russian), Seyhun Topbas (Turkish), Sharynne McLeod (Fijian - with Suzanne Hopf)

Intelligibility in Context Scale: A parent-report screening tool translated into 60 languages

The following invited  manuscript has been accepted for publication:

McLeod, S. (2014, in press). Intelligibility in Context Scale: A parent-report screening tool translated into 60 languages. Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology.

Here is the abstract:

The Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) is a free parent-report screening tool that has been translated into more than 60 languages. The creation of the 7-item scale was informed by the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (WHO, 2007). Translation and back translation into 60 languages has been undertaken internationally by speech pathologists, linguists and translators. Since the creation of the ICS, it has been validated on 120 English-speaking children in Australia and 74 Cantonese-speaking children from Hong Kong. The ICS has been normed on 804 Australian English-speaking children and additional validation, norming, and clinical studies have been conducted or are underway in countries including: Brazil, Croatia, Fiji, Iceland, Iran, Israel, Jamaica, Germany, New Zealand, Slovenia, South Africa, and Sweden. The ICS is a promising screening measure for speech pathologists to use to consider parental perceptions of children’s intelligibility with different communicative partners.

Learning from multilingual Fijians in Fiji

Over the past week I visited Suzanne Hopf in Fiji to support her PhD data collection and analysis. During the week we 

• visited a school
• assessed children's speech, language, and literacy
• conducted parent information sessions
• visited the market to collect data about people's perceptions of the causes of communication disability in children and adults and how best to support these people.

What a fascinating week! Fiji is a highly multicultural and multilingual society with the official languages being English, Fijian (also known as iTaukei Language, or Vosa Vakaviti), and Hindustani. In addition, there are speakers of: Fiji Hindi, other indigenous Fijian languages (e.g., Lauan); Rotuman; immigrant languages (e.g., Kiribati, Chinese, Punjabi); and Fiji sign language. We learned so much from the teachers, parents, children, and community members. 

As is the case for the rest of my blog, the people in the photographs have given permission for their photos to be used.

Beautiful Fiji

Fiji is a beautiful nation filled with very welcoming people. Vinaka (thank you) for the friendly greetings of bula (hello) each day.

Australia Awards Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship and Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

Today Suzanne Hopf learned that she has received an Australia Awards Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship for her research titled: “Supporting Fijian children's speech, language and literacy”. It was great to be in Fiji working with Suzanne when she received the news. 

Moments later, Sarah Verdon learned that she has received an Australia Awards Endeavour Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for her research titled: "A community-based approach to supporting Fijian children's communication development".

Suzanne and I celebrated the news in Fiji in Fijian style with fresh coconut juice.

Details of the awards are here
Details of all of the scholarship winners are here
The CSU media release is here
The brief story in the Fiji Times is here 
A long story in the Western Advocate is here

Sharynne and Suzanne celebrating the news in Nadi, Fiji