Identifying phonological awareness difficulties in preschool children with speech sound disorders

It has been exciting to see the recent interest in Sarah Masso's paper from her PhD

Masso, S., Baker, E., McLeod, S. & McCormack, J. (2014). Identifying phonological awareness difficulties in preschool children with speech sound disorders. Speech, Language, and Hearing, 17, 58-68.

This paper has been listed as one of the most read papers in the past month and the past year from the journal's website (here). We also received  a request for a copy of the paper from Bratislava, Slovakia this week!

Sarah M's travels and accomplishments

Sarah Masso has just learned that she has been awarded a Student Travel Award to attend the Australasian Human Development Association Conference in Wellington, New Zealand in a few months' time. The prize includes $500 + her conference registration.

Sarah spent the past few days visiting Bathurst. We have had an enjoyable time working on a conference poster, conference abstract, and the penultimate version of a journal article.

Sarah and Kate's work with the Sound Start Study has commenced well this year. Children have been recruited in stage 1 and a number of stage 2 assessments have been completed already. The children are on school holidays at the moment. Term 2 is a busy time when Sarah and Kate complete stage 2 and stage 3 assessments to identify the children who will participate in the stage 4 randomised controlled trial of Phoneme Factory Sound Sorter. It is wonderful to work with such talented and dedicated students and staff.

Pursuit Award

Sarah Verdon has been named as a finalist of the Pursuit Award. Here is the description of the award from the Bloorview Research Institute's website:

"The Pursuit Award recognizes current PhD students and recent alumni from around the globe for their outstanding achievements in childhood disability research.
Finalists are chosen based on significance of research results, methodologic rigour, empirical content, and impact on childhood disability care."

Sarah will fly to Canada in May to make a presentation about her research along with the other two finalists. The winner will be announced after the presentations.

 Jane McCormack was runner-up for this award in 2013.
It is wonderful to see that Charles Sturt University's PhD students are being recognised for making an important contribution to international childhood disability research.

Visiting Albury

The Albury/Thurgoona campus of CSU is 5-6 hours south of the Bathurst campus. This week I visited the Albury campus to attend my first Academic Senate meeting as a Professorial Forum representative. The Senate meeting covered issues of teaching, research, staffing, students, and other aspects of university business. I was impressed by the alignment of CSU's motto "For the public good" and the discussions of the Senate that supported staff, students, and our communities.

While in Albury I visited Sarah Verdon in her new office. She has commenced a 3-year position as a research fellow with the Research Institute of Professional Practice, Learning and Education.
I also visited the speech pathology team.

Sarah Verdon in her new office in Albury

Sharynne with members of the speech pathology team in Albury:
Jane McCormack, Catherine Easton, Linda Wilson

Kate Crowe new Associate Editor for The Volta Review

Congratulations to Dr Kate Crowe, who has been appointed Associate Editor for AG Bell’s The Volta Review, a long-standing and well-recognised journal within the field of deafness and particularly early intervention for hearing loss. Kate will be involved in managing the review process for submitted manuscripts and providing guidance to authors and reviewers: http://www.listeningandspokenlanguage.org/
Source: RIPPLE Relay, March 2015

Ben meets the mayor

This week my PhD student Ben Pham was welcomed to Bathurst by the Mayor. There were 22 new residents from across Australia with two families who have moved internationally from Pakistan and Vietnam. Bathurst is 200 years old this year, so she was invited to join the city's celebrations.

Skating Kate

Kate Crowe is a postdoctoral scholar leading the Sound Start Study (ARC Discovery Grant DP130102545). In her spare time she has been the Australian Team Manager for the Fire on Ice Senior Synchronized Skating Team that competed at the French Cup in January 2015 in Rouen, France. Here is a photo of Kate in the Macquarie Ice Rink Artistic (MIRA) competition during 2014.We are very fortunate to have such a multi-talented colleague!

NSW/ACT Young Achievers Award for Science Leadership

This weekend Sarah Verdon learned that she has won the NSW/ACT Young Achievers Award for Science Leadership for 2014! The CSU media release is here. Here is the description of Sarah's achievement as a finalist on the Young Achievers' website:

Sarah Verdon, 27 of The Rock is a dynamic speech pathologist and educator who is passionate about creating equality and embracing diversity. A PhD student at Charles Sturt University Sarah’s doctoral research is entitled Embracing Diversity, Creating Equality. The research supports the speech, language and communication of culturally and linguistically diverse children. Her thesis contains five different research projects (both quantitative and qualitative) resulting in nine research papers and multiple oral presentations at international conferences. Sarah also received the 2015 Endeavour Research Fellowship to undertake a project she designed to support the speech, language and literacy development of children in Fiji… Congratulations Sarah Verdon.

Introduction to Speech, Language, and Literacy - Oxford University Press

Today Jane McCormack and I submitted the final version of Introduction to Speech, Language, and Literacy to Oxford University Press - ready for publication. Here is the chapter line-up:

Chapter 1: What is speech, language, and literacy?

Sharynne McLeod and Jane McCormack

Chapter 2: Sociolinguistic environments of speech, language, and literacy

Catherine Easton and Jane McCormack

Chapter 3: Speech: Phonetics

 Felicity Cox and Sharynne McLeod

Chapter 4: Speech: Phonology

Sarah Masso and Elise Baker

Chapter 5: Language: Semantics

Natalie Munro and Karla McGregor

Chapter 6: Language: Morphology

Katherine Demuth, Kelly Miles, Sithembinkosi Dube, and Ekaterina Tomas

Chapter 7: Language: Syntax

Rosalind Thornton

Chapter 8: Language: Discourse and pragmatics

Alison Ferguson and Elizabeth Spencer

Chapter 9: Literacy: Reading

Sarah H. McDonagh

Chapter 10: Literacy: Writing

Noella M. Mackenzie and Janet Scull

Chapter 11: Cognitive basis for speech, language, and literacy

Karen Smith-Lock and Lyndsey Nickels

Chapter 12: Neurobiological basis for speech, language, and literacy

Angela Morgan and Frédérique J. Liégeois

Chapter 13: Interaction between speech, language, and literacy

Suze Leitão

Professor Alison Ferguson (chapter 8) and Sharynne
discussing the submission of the book

Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals - 5

I have been invited to review the US version of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals - 5 to determine its suitability for children in Australia and New Zealand. It has been an interesting exercise, particularly thinking of the relevance to the Indigenous and multilingual people in our countries, compared with those in the US.

Professorial representative on Academic Senate

I have just been appointed one of the professorial representatives on Academic Senate for Charles Sturt University until mid 2016. The Academic Senate is the principal academic body of the University "advising the Council and Vice-Chancellor on all matters relating to teaching, scholarship and research and ensuring the high quality of teaching and learning and research within the University by developing and implementing appropriate policies". More information is here. It will be an honour to serve in this role.

Sound Start Study meeting

Today our Sound Start Study team met via Skype. We linked  7 people across 5 sites, 4 cities (Bristol, UK, Sydney, Albury, Bathurst) and 2 countries. This is the third and final year of the Sound Start Study - and by the end of the year we will learn whether the computerised intervention for children with speech sound disorders (Phoneme Factory Sound Sorter) has been successful. We have to continue to blind the data from our randomised controlled trial until the end of this year - so are looking forward to finding out the result.

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

The following invited article has just been published

McLeod, S. (2015). Intelligibility in Context Scale: A parent-report screening tool translated into 60 languages. Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology, 17(1), 7-12.

 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.