Research Corner

During the final year of my master's degree, I realized that I was not as excited as my peers to join the SLP workforce. This was not because I lost the love for my chosen profession, but rather it would mean separating from my tri-fold experiences of research (completing my MSc thesis), teaching (I was a course TA), and clinical practice to focus primarily on honing my skill sets as an SLP. I realized then that I really enjoyed the diversity of the learning experiences afforded to me in each of these realms. At that time, I had an “ah-ha” moment and there began my clinician-scientist journey.

My affinity has always been for children, preschoolers more than older children, and for the subject matter of language development and disorder, though I kept my eye on aspects related to speech sound production. My research and clinical interests span the linguistic continuum from monolingualism to multilingualism in preschoolers. Of course, this is not where I began, but where I currently find myself as questions arose that necessitated my interrogation of the literature using a broader linguistic lens. My research on monolingual English speakers had its genesis during my doctoral research where I focused on characterizing learning and disorder in children with developmental language disorder, DLD (formerly known as specific language impairment or SLI), a prevalent yet understudied paediatric disorder. For this group of children, I co-developed a computer-assisted intervention program to address hallmark challenges in using grammar in an age-appropriate manner. This program resulted in many positive outcomes including, growth in grammar skills, efficiency in grammar learning, and spreading effects to untargeted areas such literacy and social skills. Despite these positive findings, not all preschoolers who received the intervention experienced similar gains. What remained therefore, was an unanswered question related to the reason for this disparity in response to an effective intervention. This unknown has motivated my current line of NIH-sponsored research where I apply neuroimaging methods, along with behavioural techniques, to understand how learning and disorder manifest in the developing brain and the effects of treatment related changes in children with DLD. The outcomes of this research will help to change the landscape of how interventions are designed for preschoolers with DLD because we will learn more about the neural mechanisms involved in both learning and in DLD.

As a result of a pivotal moment during my clinical training, I have also focused on children who use more than one language daily. For multilingual children, my research interrogates aspects of speech and language to articulate how disorder within dialect can be considered. Said differently, my research seeks to distinguish a difference in communication (i.e., attributable to speaking two or more languages) from a communication disorder (i.e., difficulties learning all languages) in multilingual children in ways that are culturally responsive. I do this by investigating understudied linguistic contexts (e.g., a creole language and its lexifier language) to broaden both our theoretical and clinical understanding of what it means to be multilingual. This is achieved by exploring topics such as variation in speech productions (i.e., producing a target in different ways despite language used) and code-switching in language use (i.e., how features of one language might be observable in another). By engaging in these broad topics, I can characterize features of typical multilingual use from those associated with a more disordered profile. For example, my NIH-funded research on variation in speech sound production seeks to understand the dynamic interplay between accuracy and variability in production and what the diagnostic contributions might be. Answering this question necessitates the use of methods of acoustic duration (e.g., timing, voicing) that are sensitive to subtle differences in speech production not detectable using traditional transcription-based tools. Ultimately, this line of work seeks to contribute more to the available tools and resources for working with children who are multilingual in ways that consider the child in the context of their linguistic environment when characterizing typical vs disordered profiles.

Ultimately, my clinician-scientist journey continues, and I am excited for what lays ahead! I look forward to opportunities to be engaged with the next generation of SLP-researchers whose interests complement and grow my own. The beneficiaries of the knowledge learned, and skill sets gained will be the children and families we serve and that is a most rewarding prospect.