Cultural Influences on Personal Narrative Development: Implications for Speech-Language Pathologists Working with Children and Adolescents with Communication Disorders

(co-presented with Dr. Carol Westby)

Dr. Chan is Associate Professor and founding member of the Speech Therapy Unit at the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She studies child first and second language acquisition in cross-linguistic and multilingual contexts, so far involving Cantonese, Mandarin, English, German, Urdu and Kam. Her interests include cognitive linguistic, typological-functional and processing approaches to the study of language acquisition and disorders, clinical linguistics, and development of language assessment and intervention approaches for children in a Chinese and bilingual context. She is collaborating with researchers from the European COST Action LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) Bi-SLI initiative to study bilingual ethnic minority children in Hong Kong and China, and her team members have developed language assessment tools for Cantonese, Mandarin, Kam and Urdu.

Global Initiatives in Narrative Language Sampling and Analysis

(co-presented with Dr. Marleen Westerveld)

Prof. Gagarina is Vice Director of the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) and Head of the Research Area 2 'Language Development & Multilingualism'. Her research focuses on monolingual and bilingual (a)typical language acquisition in the areas of lexicon, morphosyntax, discourse, as well as aspect and anaphors. She is the head of the international research network MAIN (multilingual assessment instrument of [fictional] narratives), hosted at Leibniz-zas (https://main.leibniz-zas.de) and has published >100 peer-reviewed papers. Prof Gagarina has worked intensively on the macro- and microstructure of narratives and the development of language assessment methods for multilingual children.

Cultural Influences on Personal Narrative Development: Implications for Speech-Language Pathologists Working with Children and Adolescents with Communication Disorders

(co-presented with Dr. Angel Chan)

Dr. Westby is a fellow of the American-Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), has received the Honors of ASHA and the Kleffner Lifetime Clinical Achievement Award, and holds Board Certification in Child Language. Dr. Westby has received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Geneva College and the University of Iowa's Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology and the ASHA Award for Contributions to Multicultural Affairs. She is widely recognized for her development of the Westby Playscale, an assessment tool for young children. She has published and presented nationally and internationally on a wide variety of topics including screen time and learning in the 21st century, assessing and facilitating play in children, theory of mind, narrative development, adverse childhood experiences, and issues in assessment and intervention with culturally/linguistically diverse populations. 

Global Initiatives in Narrative Language Sampling and Analysis

(co-presented with Dr. Natalia Gagarina)

Prof. Westerveld is the Chair of the Global TALES Network, with interdisciplinary members from more than 25 countries. She is a Fellow of Speech Pathology Australia, the Chair of the Child Language Committee of IALP (the International Association of Communication Sciences and Disorders), and an executive committee member of the International Association for the Study of Child Language. She brings extensive expertise in the area of personal narrative development and disorders in neurotypical children and children with diagnosed language disorders. She has >100 peer-reviewed publications, including ~25 journal articles and 2 book chapters focusing on narrative language.

Personal Narratives in Multilingual Contexts

(co-presented with Dr. Andrea MacLeod)

Asst Prof Filiatrault-Veilleux's main research interests are around the provision of better language assessment and intervention using narratives that can help reduce barriers to meaningful daily life participation for children with support needs. Dr. Filiatrault-Veilleux currently serves as the Deputy Chair of the Global TALES Network, with her role focussed on the creation of new research partnerships and strategic planning of the uptake of the Global TALES. She also holds a research grant as Principal Investigator to use the Global TALES protocol in Canada (in French and in English) (FRM New Investigator Grant), in addition to providing supervision to HDR students involved in the Global TALES project in Canada. With the Global TALES protocol, Dr. Filiatrault-Veilleux aims at providing a clinical tool for speech-language pathologists in Canada to analyze and interpret children's personal narrative performance (in French and English).

Personal Narratives in Multilingual Contexts

(co-presented with Dr. Filiatrault-Veilleux)

Prof. MacLeod held a Canadian Research Chair in Bilingual Acquisition and Communication Disorders and has received major grants as a principal investigator from organizations such as SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR and the US National Science Foundation to study speech and language development in bilingual children. She is also an active co-investigator on several pan-Canadian grants. Dr. MacLeod's research has focused on the speech and language abilities of bilingual children and adults. She has developed expertise in the study of speech and language development among bilingual children from Official Language Minority Communities in Canada and among children from minoritized language communities, including immigrant and refugee children. Her work with bilingual children led her to co-found a non-profit organization to support bilingual language development in young refugee children. This work has led to continued community-based research within a social-justice framework to understand how to best support language maintenance and transmission.

Telling Personal and Fictional Tales: An Examination of Narrative Language in African American Children

Professor Mills' research program employs mixed methods to examine the cognitive, social and linguistic resources that school-age African American children draw upon to narrate or tell stories. She directs the Child Language Ability Lab (C-Lab) which is currently engaged in projects examining narrative assessment and dialectal code-switching between African American English and Mainstream American English.

Clinical Applications of the Global TALES Protocol

Lisa Domby is a clinical Associate Professor and Coordinator of Undergraduate Studies (including the SPHS Minor) in the Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences at the UNC School of Medicine, and Director of Global Partnerships for the Department of Health Sciences. She has longstanding clinical and research interests in best practice for serving culturally and linguistically diverse populations. Since 2007 Ms Domby has directed a community-based learning program in Guatemala, with a focus on technical assistance, program development and long-term sustainability. Most recently, this collaboration led to the Brillo Assessment of Expressive Language, designed to identify and characterize language impairments in Guatemalan Spanish-speaking children. Through Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), she facilitates shared learning with students at UNC and peers at Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala. Lisa Domby is a member of the Professional Development Committee of the ASHA Special Interest Group in Global Issues in Communication Sciences and Related Disorders, and the Global TALES Network of the International Association of Communication Sciences and Disorders (IALP).

Assessment of Personal Narratives in Children with Language Disorders: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Vani Gupta is a certified practising speech pathologist whose doctoral research systematically investigates which personal narrative assessment and analysis methods have been used with children (with or without developmental language disorder). Vani's work also applies the LUNA framework (Dipper et al., 2021) to personal narrative analysis, and examines which analysis measures may be sensitive in identifying language difficulties across the four different components of the LUNA framework: pragmatics, macrostructure planning, propositional and linguistics