What Influences Speech Pathology Practice for Children with Complex Communication Needs from Multilingual Families? An Australian Perspective.
Natalie Skinner, Scott Barnes
PMID 41964429WHAT IT FOUND
Families often resisted AAC, asking when therapy would work on talking instead.
English dominated both sessions and device choice, and speech pathologists lacked the time, funding and interpreters to build systems in home languages.
Key findings
01Families frequently expected therapy to get their child talking and pushed back on AAC, asking when the speech pathologist would work on speech rather than the device; some worried a device would stop their child speaking, while other families were receptive and saw AAC as giving their child a voice.
02English dominated both the language sessions were run in and the language of the AAC systems offered; families chose English so their child could go to school and join the community, some believed two languages would be too much of a burden for a child with a disability, and AAC options in South East Asian and Middle Eastern languages were largely unavailable.
03Speech pathologists described systemic barriers: funding for interpreting varied between services and was often absent, many had never worked with a professional interpreter and relied on family members instead, and there was not enough funded time to build bilingual AAC systems.
04Participants mostly presented as supportive of home language maintenance and several actively encouraged it, and many were saddened by language loss, yet they also reported prioritising English for the child's development and did not consistently support home languages in their interventions.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The 23 speech pathologists were recruited through AAC networks and were unusually interested in cultural and linguistic diversity; 48% spoke more than one language against about 20.2% of speech pathologists nationally, so the sensitivity reported here is likely higher than in the wider workforce. Families were not interviewed. Everything about what families want, believe and choose is the speech pathologists' account of it, and the authors state that families' own perspectives still need to be sought. The literature review behind the paper searched only English-language research, which the authors note may bias the field toward Anglo or Western theoretical constructs. Most participants described little or no training in this area, so their accounts reflect learning on the job rather than an established standard of practice, and participants' interest in cultural and linguistic diversity may mean others have thought about this less.
Declared interests
The first author was supported by a Macquarie University Research Training Program Scholarship and a NSW Education Waratah Scholarship. The authors declare no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence about what multilingual families actually think or want. The families were never interviewed. Every theme comes from 23 speech pathologists describing their own caseloads, and those who took part were unusually interested in cultural and linguistic diversity and far more likely to speak more than one language than the Australian workforce as a whole.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →