Hong Kong University

As part of my Future Fellowship I am travelling to a number of countries over the next 2 months.
The first place I visited was Hong Kong University. During my visit I presented two seminars for speech therapists across Hong Kong:

Children's speech acquisition

Prevalence, risk, and impact of childhood speech and language impairment

I learned about Cantonese, and worked with Dr Carol To and Pamela Cheung on children's speech acquisition. I also discussed research with Tara Whitehill, Anita Wong, Estella Ma, Brad McPherson, Brendan Weekes, Edwin Yiu, Manwa Ng, Lydia So, Diana Ho, Lorinda Kwan, and others from the department. I was also taken to many fantastic resturants, incluing the one pictured below where the whole deparment took me out to lunch! One delicacy that I was given was ducks' tongues (I am not sure if this was specially reserved for visiting speech therapists)!

Sharynne, Jessica and Tara Whitehill
visiting Lamma Island

Carol To, Sharynne, and Pamela Cheung at HKU

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Lunch with the staff from HKU

Listening to children

One of the privileges of this Future Fellowship is listening to children. I am about to visit countries from Asia to Africa (via USA, Europe and UK) as part of the Future Fellowship and am looking forward to talking with children and people who devote their lives to children's speech and language.

Book: Children's speech

Dr Elise Baker (The University of Sydney) and I have been working together on a number of projects. While we were in Melbourne we co-presented a paper on evidence-based practice for intervention for children with speech sound disorders. We also worked on a book proposal and chapters outlined in my Future Fellowship for a book titled Children's speech.

Speech Pathology Australia National Conference

The Speech Pathology Australia National Conference was held in Melbourne this year.

Mr Bill Shorten, Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children's Services opened the conference, and suggested that speech pathologists are "civil rights actors" (I completely agree!). I was invited by SPA to discuss our research into the prevalence and impact of childhood communication impairment with Mr Shorten at the end of the conference.

During the conference I co-presented the following studies:

• The Sound Effects Study: A four-phased study examining speech impairment in a community-based sample of 4- to 5-year olds
• The Sound Effects Study: Speech impairment in early childhood ascertained by direct assessment, speech pathologist, teacher, parent, and child report
• The Sound Effects Study: Speech impairment in Indigenous and non Indigenous Australian children and co-occurrence with difficulties with language, hearing, oro-motor, and pre-literacy. 
• The Sound Effects Study: The experience and impact of speech impairment in early childhood
• The Sound Effects Study: Access to and participation in speech pathology services for children with speech impairment
• Evidence-based intervention for children with speech sound disorders (Baker & McLeod)
• Nonword repetition: A systematic review of purposes, populations, languages and variables (Crowe, McLeod & Ching)

Speech Pathology Australia and Charles Sturt University promoted the Sound Effects Study through their media releases. We were interviewed on a number of radio stations and our work was reported in online newspapers as a result.

 Dr. Gregg Lof from MIH, Boston was a keynote speaker. It was a great honour to have Gregg in Australia and for Australian speech pathologists to hear his dynamic presentations.

Sound Effects Study writing retreat

The Sound Effects Study was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant from 2007-2009. Linda Harrison, Lindy McAllister, Jane McCormack and I spent 3 productive days in Melbourne writing papers from the Sound Effects Study. We submitted 1 paper and have 4 almost ready to submit. We also prepared to present 5 papers at the Speech Pathology Australia National Conference.

Sound Effects Study website
Chinese English People's News story
Iespider news

Vietnam’s first speech therapy degree

Australian Volunteers International and Trinh Foundation Australia is supporting Vietnam’s first speech therapy degree, to start at Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine, in Ho Chi Minh City in September 2010. Students will undertake a two-year postgraduate diploma. I have been invited to be one of the first academics to teach in the course.

The agreement for the course to be established was signed by

• Professor Lindy McAllister, The University of Queensland
• Professor Nguyen Tan Binh, Rector of Pham Ngoc Thach University
• Dr Nguyen Thi Ngoc Dung, Professor of the ENT Department of Pham Ngoc Thach University and Director of ENT Hospital, Ho Chi Minh City

I will be teaching one subject within the course and will be working with the student to establish protocols for the assessment of children's speech as part of my Future Fellowship.

Trinh Foundation website

L-R Sue Woodward, Marie Atherton, Lindy McAllister, Alison Winkworth
and Sharynne McLeod at the Trinh Foundation fundraising night

Multilingual children with hearing loss: Communication choices and outcomes

Kate Crowe (centre) with her supervisors
Prof. Sharynne McLeod and Dr. Teresa Ching

On Friday 7th May Kate Crowe, my PhD student presented her endorsement of candidature session at Australian Hearing in Chatswood, Sydney. Her PhD is titled Multilingual children with hearing loss: Communcation choices and outcomes.
Here is her synposis:
Children with hearing loss often have difficulty acquiring language due to their reduced ability to perceive spoken language (McConkey Robbins, Green, & Waltzman, 2004). Caregivers of children with a hearing loss must make decisions regarding their child’s communication mode (e.g., oral, manual or mixed communication) at very early stages in their child’s development, and re-evaluate these decisions as their child develops (Wheeler, Archbold, Hardie, & Watson, 2009). Caregivers from multilingual families or families where the preferred language is not the dominant community language, must also decide which language or languages they will use with their child (Waltzman, McConkey Robbins, Green, & Cohen, 2003). This situation leads to four areas of investigation explored in this thesis, all of which have been relatively unexplored in the literature to date. Firstly, what is the demography of communication mode and language use of children with hearing loss? Secondly, which factors do caregivers consider when making decisions about communication mode and language use for their child with a hearing loss? Thirdly, which factors do professionals consider important when advising the caregivers of children with hearing loss about communication mode and language use choices? Finally, what are the speech, language and participation outcomes of children with hearing loss in terms of the impact of different language use options? The information gained from these investigations will assist caregivers and professionals in understanding how decisions about communication mode and language use are made and the possible impact of these decisions on the speech, language and participation of children with hearing loss. Results will be discussed in the framework of the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health - Children and Youth (ICF-CY, World Health Organization, 2007b), making findings accessible to health and education professionals internationally.

Occasional address at the CSU graduation

I was invited to give the occasional address at the Charles Sturt University Faculty of Education graduation ceremony today. My address was titled 'Every child is important'. It was wonderful to see the proud smiles of the graduating students.

With Chancellor Lawrie Willett

Presenting the occasional address

IJSLP accepted by Medline

I have just learned that IJSLP has been accepted for indexing by Medline. This is a very significant moment for the journal and will ensure that our work is seen by many more readers throughout the world. Our acceptance into Medline continues the exciting trend of the inclusion of IJSLP into the world's top databases. This continues the success of the journal over recent months: IJSLP has been accepted into PsychINFO, SCOPUS, and ISI (Spcial Sciences Citation Index) and now Medline!

Multilingual Australia

Australia is a very multilingual society. Of the languages other than English reported to be used at home, the most dominant languages are Italian (10.4%), Greek (8.0%), Cantonese (7.8%), Arabic (7.7%) and Mandarin (7.0%) (Australia Bureau of Statistics, 2006). In order the most frequent languages spoken are:

• Italian
• Greek 
• Cantonese
• Arabic
• Mandarin
• Vietnamese
• Spanish
• German
• Hindi
• Macedonian
• Croatian
• Australian Indigenous languages
• Korean 
• Turkish
• Polish
• Tagalog
• Serbian
• French
• Indonesian
• Filipino
• Maltese
• Russian
• Dutch
• Other Chinese languages
• Japanese
• Tamil
• Sinhalese
• Samoan
• Portuguese
• Khmer
• Persian
• Hungarian
• Dari 
• Other Iranic languages
• Other languages

Amazing Australia

As part of my Future Fellowship I have travelled to different places in Australia. Here are a few photos to show our amazing country.

Speech Pathology Australia National Tour

Speech Pathology Australia National Tour:
Working With Children From Multilingual Backgrounds
Presented by Associate Professor Cori Williams

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the Speech Pathology Australia (SPA) National Tour presented by Cori Williams. It was wonderful to listen and learn from Cori and to discuss these important issues with other SLPs including Kate Crowe, my PhD student who also went to Canberra for the day. A number of SLPs from Canberra work with children of diplomats, so conducting intervention in these children's home languages is very important for when they return to their home countries.

Cori and I have designed a questionnaire that is being given to each of the participants in the SPA National Tour workshops to find out about Australian SLPs' beliefs and practices about working with children from multilingual backgrounds. Cori has now finished two of her eight presentations, so we look forward to analysing the data when she is finished.

Associate Professor Cori Williams and Professor Sharynne McLeod
thinking about multilingual speech in Canberra

HCSNet Workshop: Advances in Speech Production

This week I attended the HCSNet Workshop: Advances in Speech Production: Tools, Techniques and Recent Research at University of Western Sydney, Milperra.
There were many distinguished speakers:

• Christian Kroos (MARCS Labs, UWS) Making speech production transparent: The AHAA and Face & Voice laboratories at MARCS
• Douglas Whalen (Haskins Laboratories, U.S.A.). Ultrasound investigation of speech articulation dynamics
• Mark Tiede (Haskins Labs & MIT, U.S.A.). Uses and abuses of ElectroMagnetic Articulometry (EMA)
• Andy Butcher (Flinders U) Electropalatography (EPG): Tracking the spatio-temporal patterns of tongue-palate contact.
• Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson (U British Columbia, Canada). Time to re-think temporal control of communicative behavior
• Roland Goecke (U Canberra). Tracking faces without artificial markers

I co-presented 2 papers:

• Adaptation to the electropalatograph (EPG) palate: Consonant acoustics, listener perceptions, and speaker rating (Sharynne McLeod and Jeff Searl)
• Combining ultrasound and electropalatography (EPG) for research into speech production (Sharynne McLeod and Alan Wrench)

CSU speech pathology graduation

On Thursday I went to Charles Sturt University in Albury to celebrate the graduation of:

• Bethany Toohill who graduated with BHlthSc(Sp Path)(Hons) and was supervised by Jane McCormack and myself
• Anna O'Callaghan who graduated with a PhD and was the first CSU undergraduate speech pathology student to graduate with a PhD
• Michelle Smith-Tamaray who also graduated with a PhD. Michelle and Anna were the CSU speech pathology course's first PhD graduates.
• The last cohort of CSU speech pathology undergraduate students that I taught (when they were in year 2).

It was a very special day to celebrate these achievements and to hear about what they are all doing now.

Sharynne McLeod, Bethany Toohill and Jane McCormack:
Proud supervisors celebrating Bethany's graduation.

Big ASC: Big Australian Speech Corpus

Over the past 2 days I have been in Sydney to work with Australia's best linguists and phoneticians to develop protocols for the Big ASC: Big Australian Speech Corpus. The aim of the project is to collect high quality audio and video recordings of Australian adults' speech from across the country. The data will be loaded into the Australian National Corpus for people across the world to use in their research.
Future funding applications may enable the development of the Little ASC of Australian children.

Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children

My latest book officially began today. Within 12 hours of inviting authors over a third have said yes! I am looking forward to working with Brian on this exciting project:

Title: Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children
Editors: Sharynne McLeod and Brian A. Goldstein
Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Synopsis: Multilingual Aspects of Speech Sound Disorders in Children aims to translate research into clinical practice for speech-language pathologists working with multilingual children with speech sound disorders. The book explores both multilingual and multicultural aspects of children with speech sound disorders. It is divided into three sections: I. Foundations, II. Multilingual speech acquisition, III. Speech-language pathology practice.
An introductory chapter will discuss general characteristics. Subsequent chapters will address speech acquisition, how the disorder manifests in different languages, cultural contexts, and speakers, and addresses diagnosis, assessment and intervention.

A unique feature of this book is the translation of research into clinical practice. There will be 14 research chapters that primarily focus on an identified topic and describe available research across a wide range of languages. These will be supplemented by application/translation chapters that translate research into practice providing vignettes for specific geographical or linguistic contexts.

By including these two different styles of chapters authors will be drawn from across the globe to provide exemplars of the multitude of issues when working with multilingual children with speech sound disorders.

International trans-disciplinary perspectives on speech and language

On Wednesday 7th April, 2010 two renowned academics visited Charles Sturt University, Bathurst: Sara Howard, Reader in Clinical Phonetics, President, International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association and Mick Perkins, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Linguistics both of the Department of Human Communication Sciences at The University of Sheffield, England.

The morning program consisted of a seminar and discussion

The afternoon program consisted of the following public lectures:

Mick Perkins: Pragmatic impairment: Cognitive deficit or interactional achievement?

Sara Howard:Analysing children's speech: From single words to connected speech

Ben Bradley: Infancy, language and thirdness

The aim of this day was to catalyse thinking and collaboration between practitioners and researchers who have interests in speech and language but have different disciplinary and ideological standpoints.

CSU news announcement

Sara and Mick being interviewed at radio 2BS

Japanese, Italian and Tongan

• This week I was invited by Margaret Crapp to give a presentation to the Inner Wheel Club titled "Supporting others to realize their full potential". Part of their mission is to provide friendship and international understanding.
• Hannah Wilkin and I worked on Japanese and Italian word lists for the International Speech Assessment (ISA).
• I went to a dinner for Japanese visitors from Toyo High School (Tokyo).
• I then went to a Tongan night hosted by 'Oto and Bella Faiva and their family and learned of the importance of the royalty, church and community to the Tongan people and how people wear a tapa to show their respect.

Vale Dr. Sadanand Singh

I learned today that my friend, colleague and co-author, Dr. Sadanand Singh passed away on the weekend. Dr. Singh was the founder of both Singular Publishing and Plural Publishing. He was a giant in our profession, a visionary and a gracious gentleman. He will be greatly missed.
New York Times
Plural Publishing

Visit to Macquarie University, Sydney

Today I visited Macquarie University and met with:

Dr. Felicity Cox , Department of Linguistics: Felicity is going to be working with the electropalatography and ultrasound technology for recording speech production that I used to write Speech Sounds (McLeod & Singh, 2009). Felicity is also the founder of the the Australian Voices project and is working on building the Australian National Corpus (AusNC).

Professor Katherine Demuth, Department of Linguistics: Katherine wrote the chapter on Sesotho speech acquisition in the International Guide to Speech Acquisition (McLeod, 2007). Katherine give me advice regarding my visit to Mwandi in Zambia to work with children who speak Silozi.

Katherine Demuth, Sharynne McLeod (wearing a helmet to stablize ultrasound recordings of the tongue) and Feliticy Cox

Professor Gail Whiteford, Pro Vice-Chancellor Social Inclusion. Prof. Whiteford showed me some of the work she is undertaking to promote social inclusion across the university.