• Charles Sturt University experts have addressed 16,000 American speech-language pathologists at their annual convention in Boston, USA
• The presentation was designated as an ASHA Convention ‘Changemaker’ Session
• The presentation was one of 117 presentations selected from 3,400 submissions recognised as exceptional and which promote or demonstrate innovation

Charles Sturt University researchers have addressed participants at the largest meeting of American speech-language pathologists.

Charles Sturt Professor of Speech and Language Acquisition Sharynne McLeod in the Charles Sturt School of Education addressed the annual meeting of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, with Charles Sturt PhD student Ms Kate Margetson and Charles Sturt Adjunct Associate Professor Kate Crowe.

This is the largest meeting of American speech-language pathologists and 16,000 participants attend the convention.

In the lead-up to the convention, organisers advised Professor McLeod their presentations addressing ‘Methods for accurate differential diagnosis of speech sound disorder in multilingual children’ had been designated as an ASHA Convention ‘Changemaker’ Session.

Professor McLeod said this special designation was developed specifically for the 2023 ASHA Convention, in keeping with its theme of ‘Igniting Innovation’.

“It was a great honour to be invited to speak to such a large gathering of peers,” Professor McLeod said.

The selection specifically recognises presentations that are exceptional and promote or demonstrate innovation in one of the following ways: 

• Potential to make an important or significant positive change at the patient, systemic, or discipline level.
• Strong evidence that the work being presented has had a significant impact, or has the potential to provoke important change, at the individual, systemic, or discipline level.
• Transformative research or clinical work that has dramatically changed the practices or future research (e.g., Contributes to new best practices).

The organisers said there were many sessions that embraced the theme and were quite strong, highlighting great examples of innovation in practice, but the Charles Sturt team’s was one of only 117 specifically selected from more than 3,400 submissions.

Each Topic Committee had the choice of recommending only three top-rated sessions that merited this special ‘Changemaker’ recognition, across any session format, any member or affiliation type, and across both submission categories of professional education and research.

The presentations by Professor McLeod, Ms Margetson and Associate Professor Crowe were assessed as exceptional and worthy of this special recognition and was presented in the topic area ‘Speech Sound Disorders in Children with Normal Hearing’ at the convention on Saturday 18 November.

The co-authors of ‘Methods for accurate differential diagnosis of speech sound disorder in multilingual children’ include Karla Washington (Canada), Kathryn Crowe (Charles Sturt, Iceland), Sharynne McLeod (Charles Sturt), Kate Margetson (Charles Sturt), Leslie Kokotek (Canada), Pauline van der Straten Waillet (Belgium), Thora Masdottir (Iceland), Marc Volhardt (Iceland).

Also at the convention, ASHA launched its ‘developmental milestones’ collection. The data ASHA used to describe children’s speech development is from a paper by Professor McLeod and colleague Dr Kate Crowe in 2020, ‘Children’s English consonant acquisition in the United States: A review.’ American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 29(4), 2155–2169.

ENDS