March 2, 2012

January-February 2012 summary

AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL FUTURE FELLOWSHIP UPDATE
‘Speaking my language: International speech acquisition in Australia’
Written by Kim Woodland, Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education for the February 2012 RIPPLE Update

Sharynne has spent time over the last few months continuing her Future Fellowship research, collaborating on other research and publication projects, and working with speech pathology students and the three doctoral students and two honours students she is supervising this year. She was recently interviewed by ABC Science online for her opinion on results from a new study that examined the ability of adults and toddlers (aged 2 and 4) to change their vowel productions based on how they perceived their own speech output. A range of media coverage has also resulted from the completion of the ‘Infants’ lives in childcare’ project, funded by the ARC, which a number of RIPPLE members were part of. Further information on the international interest this project has garnered appears in the ‘Awards and Success Stories’ section of this Update (p. 6). A project Sharynne is currently collecting data for is ‘Talking about talking: Children’s perspectives’, a project which explores typically developing young children’s perspectives about their talking and listening, with the aim of facilitating educational transition between early childhood and school settings. She also recently gave an online lecture—‘Cross-linguistic aspects of communication development’—which was appropriately broadcast across 3 continents, in 5 different time zones, and in 2 languages (it was translated into Portuguese at one of the sites). Finally, in the last RIPPLE Update, I wrote about a book that Sharynne was finalising with Brian Goldstein. The book, Multilingual aspects of speech sound disorders in children, has just been published by Multilingual Matters in the United Kingdom. For more information, please visit Sharynne’s blog: Speaking my languages.