March 18, 2010

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

March 14, 2010

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.

March 2, 2010

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

March 1, 2010

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.