Spring semester orientation (January 2023)
With the introduction of new undergraduate RAs and our lab projects moving full speed ahead, the lab leadership team had the idea of holding a two-day orientation with the purpose of introducing and training RAs in each project. Not only did RAs have opportunities to bond over breakfast and lunch, but they also came away prepared for data collection and entry. On the 2nd day, we additionally celebrated the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday as a lab. It was a fantastic start to what looks to be the most exciting semester yet for the BDC Lab!
ASHA (November 2022)
Dr. Pham, Dr. Dam, and our doctoral students, Alicia and Sophie, attended the 2022 ASHA Convention in New Orleans. Dr. Pham, Alicia, and Sophie had the opportunity to present on their work, and we are all very proud of how well-received their presentations were. In addition, Dr. Pham was named as a recipient of ASHA’s Fellowship of the Association award for 2022. It recognizes her illustrious career of bilingual research and we could not name a person more deserving of the award. Congratulations to Dr. Pham, Alicia, and Sophie for a successful convention!
BDC Lab Kick-Off (August 2022)
With the introduction of our new lab space on Alvarado Road and with the lab growing in size by year, we began a new era of the BDC Lab in August 2022 with a special kick-off event. All RAs, old and new, came together to learn about the purpose of the lab, introduce themselves to each other, and prepare for their assigned projects. It was a great event to welcome everyone into the new lab space and a new year!
2022 Student Research Symposium
The Student Research Symposium (SRS) is an annual event at SDSU where undergraduate and graduate students showcase their research projects and creative endeavors. Free and open to the public, SRS offers a variety of oral, poster, exhibit, and performance presentations that display the outstanding scholarly accomplishments of SDSU students.
In March, the first in-person SRS since 2020, the BDC Lab had an amazing FIVE presentations at this year’s event! With a mix of oral and poster presentations, our RAs presented on their projects’ progress, findings, and future directions. Below are this year’s presentations from our lab:
Alicia Escobedo, Measuring accuracy of treatment targets through visual analog scales following phonological intervention
Elise Ramirez, Quynh Dam, & Kaitlan Nguyen, Involving Caregivers in Telepractice Assessment: Increasing Adherence to Testing Procedures
Khanh Nguyen, Vietnamese classifiers in stories: Case examples from children with and without language disorder
Sophie Levi, New Tasks to Measure Nonverbal Working Memory and Attention in Children
Danielle Guevarra, Experiences of speech-language pathologists in the Philippines
We are extremely proud of every RA’s hard work over the past year on their projects, and we hope that everyone found it to be an enriching and educational experience!
SLHS SRS Practice Session
This year’s SLHS SRS Practice Session was a school-wide event for presenters to practice and prepare their presentations for the following week’s Student Research Symposium. Presenters, including a host of RAs from the BDC lab, had the opportunity to receive feedback from SLHS faculty, graduate students, and fellow classmates. It was a fun “dress rehearsal” for the next week’s main event!
San Diego Tết Festival 2022
The San Diego Tết Festival is an annual celebration of the Lunar New Year organized by local Vietnamese organizations in the city. This year, for the first time, the BDC Lab participated in the festival and hosted our own booth! During the three-day event, we promoted our current research studies and raised awareness about the
importance and need for biingualism. We also had a fun game for children to play
that tested their bilingual knowledge, as well as a photo frame for booth visitors to
take a picture with. Lab RAs were able to bond and work together to help visitors
learn more about our work. Overall, it was an amazing and enriching experience as
a lab!
Introducing our Research Specialist: Ngoc Do
Joining us beginning in the Fall 2021 semester, we have a new full-time research specialist in the lab: Ngoc Do! Ngoc is returning to us from Norway, where she pursued a master’s degree in health economics and graduated in 2021. Her BDC Lab journey began in 2016, where she volunteered in the BDC Lab to translate Vietnamese protocols and by 2017, she officially became an RA! She now rejoins the BDC Lab as a research specialist, specifically working on the DLDMarkers project. Ngoc always finds the fulfilling feeling of giving back to society unparalleled, and she hopes to contribute her skills to benefit the Vietnamese community.
ASHA
This November, our doctoral student, Quynh Dam, along with RAs Chris Nguyen and Elise Ramirez and lab director Dr. Giang Pham, had the opportunity to present virtually at the 2021 ASHA Convention as part of the convention’s Virtual Library’s Live Q&A sessions. Their project, English morpheme use in Vietnamese-speaking children, explored English grammatical development in bilingual Vietnamese-English children using tense markers. Everyone had a very fun time engaging with and fielding questions from attendees and Quynh, Chris, and Elise were able to practice their presentation skills with members of the SLHS field!
Dam, Q., Nguyen, C., Ramirez, E., & Pham, G. (November, 2021). Proposal Number 12180:
English Morpheme Use in Vietnamese-speaking Children.
CALEx (Culture & Language Exchange Group)
Coming back to the lab in-person, we wanted a way to combine all of our bilingual knowledge in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Tagalog and learn more from each other. This fall, we created CALEx, our Culture & Language Exchange group. Every month, this group meets to teach each other phrases from their respective languages and the cultural context behind them. It is their goal to build a small bank of phrases in each language to communicate their respect for culturally and linguistically diverse clients and families. It is a fantastic way to learn cultural competence and expand language boundaries!
Summer in the BDC Lab
This summer, the BDC Lab was excited to welcome new RAs and projects into the lab that contributed to our diverse range of research. From furthering our testing in Project TELL to a new area of outreach in Filipino speech pathologists to a new project in CARE, we spent the summer working together virtually in order to reach our individual and collective goals as a lab. This summer was a valuable time for us to learn more about each other and work on our interests and strengths, and we are excited to bring our progress into the upcoming school year.
2021 Summer Undergraduate Research Project
This summer, one of our undergraduate RAs, Elise Ramirez, had the opportunity to participate in the 2021 SDSU Summer Undergraduate Research Project (SURP). Mentored by Quynh Dam, the lab’s doctoral student, Elise worked on Quynh’s CARE (Caregivers Assisting Remote Evaluations) project, developing materials and protocols to help caregivers assist with language assessments. In addition, she worked on programming questionnaires on the Qualtrics survey platform with the goal of better understanding perspectives on telepractice from caregivers. Elise found the experience to be very enriching and embraced the opportunity to further develop her goal of being a bilingual SLP. She looks forward to continuing her work in the fall and present at next year’s Student Research Symposium.
2021 API Speaker Series with Dr. Giang Pham, Quynh Dam, and Dr. Kerry Ebert
In February 2021, our lab director Dr. Giang Pham and doctoral student Quynh Dam, along with Dr. Kerry Ebert from the University of Minnesota, presented at the API SLH Caucus Speaker Series about online Vietnamese assessment tools for SLPs working with Vietnamese-speaking children. It was a very enriching presentation about the VietSLP website, including its background, how to access these resources, and how to administer them, whether one is a bilingual or monolingual SLP. Over 150 people attended the talk, and it was fulfilling to be able to reach international members of the caucus with our presentation!
Temple University Round Table Panel Discussion
In November 2020, our lab director, Dr. Giang Pham, presented at the Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Assessments Round Table Panel Discussion hosted by Temple University. The presentation was extremely informative and discussed L1 & L2 growth and transfer in typical and clinical bilingual populations.
Fall 2020 Semester in the Lab Goes Virtual
This fall semester posed a unique obstacle for the lab due to the COVID-19 pandemic: conducting research in a fully virtual environment. Luckily, the BDC lab was ready for the challenge and adapted by using Canvas, GroupMe, and Zoom in order to stay as connected and on top of our work as possible. We are happy that the lab has managed to mimic an in-person lab environment as much as possible and look forward to when we can work together in the SLHS building once again.
2020 Summer Undergraduate Research Project
This past summer, two of the BDC lab’s research assistants, Chris Nguyen and Juliana Salazar, had the opportunity to work on their independent research projects. Mentored by Dr. Giang Pham and supervised by Dr. Tien Ho, their projects focused on bilingual language development in their native languages, Vietnamese and Spanish, respectively. Both Chris and Juliana found the summer project to be extremely enriching and educational for their development as bilingual SLPs. They look forward to continuing to work on their project throughout the fall semester and present at the 2021 Student Research Symposium.
2020 Student Research Symposium
The Student Research Symposium (SRS) is an annual event at SDSU where undergraduate and graduate students showcase their research projects. The event is free and open to the public. It offers a variety of oral, poster, exhibit, and performance presentations that all recognize the outstanding scholarly accomplishments of SDSU students.
This past February, the BDC lab’s three on-going projects (Peer Interaction, Reading Attitude, and Sentence Formulation) each had poster presentations at SRS. They presented on the current progress of their research, preliminary findings, and future steps to undertake. The poster presentations were titled:
Peer Interactions in an Intervention for Spanish-speaking Children with and without Developmental Language Disorder
Is Reading Attitude related to Reading Ability to Monolingual Vietnamese Children?
Eliciting Grammatical Productions in Vietnamese Children Using a Sentence Formulation Task
The BDC Lab is incredibly proud of the work that they have done, and all participating lab members found it to be a very educational and enriching experience.
SLHS Poster Presentations
The SLHS Poster Presentations was a departmental event to prepare for the following week’s university-wide Student Research Symposium. BDC lab members practiced presenting their research posters to SLHS faculty and peers. Posters were hung throughout the SLHS building, and SLHS faculty, masters’ students, and members of the public were able to walk through, listen to presentations, and ask questions to prepare presenters for the next week’s main event.
Introducing our International Student Scholar: Lisa Nguyen
For the semester of Fall 2019, Lisa Nguyen was one of the newest student researchers in our lab. Lisa is a visiting scholar from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She is currently a senior majoring in Speech Sciences and aims to become a Speech-Language Pathologist. She received the Globalink Research Award from Mitacs, a nonprofit organization that supports industrial and social innovation in Canada. Utilizing this Research Award, she has traveled to San Diego State University to conduct her research. Her project at the BDC Lab focuses on phonological awareness development in Vietnamese children. The BDC team is excited to host Lisa and support her research endeavors.
Speech-Language Awareness & Information Day (SAID) 2019
SAID is a community event that raises awareness about speech and language disorders and resources for affected individuals, their families, friends, and allied professionals in the San Diego area. The event is free and open to the public. It offers a community resource fair, a keynote presentation, along with other presenters, and an expert panel for questions.
Our lab shared with attendees what we study and how the outcomes and results can help the community. In this event, we were able to talk to SLPs, parents, and related professionals about bilingual language development and disorders.
This event is co-sponsored by the SDSU Chapter of the National Student Speech-Language and Hearing Association and the SDSU School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences.
Presentations by Dr. Sharynne McLeod and Ben Pham
In the fall semester of 2017, the BDC lab hosted two international speakers, Dr. Sharynne McLeod and PhD student Ben Pham of Charles Sturt University of Australia.
Dr. McLeod presented on the topic of “Multilingual Children’s Speech: A World Tour.” In this talk, Dr. McLeod discussed the importance of effective assessment practices, particularly for monolingual speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who work with children from linguistically diverse backgrounds. Dr. McLeod shared with the audience a compilation of free resources from the Multilingual Children’s Speech website. The audience included undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students, and faculty from the School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, as well as SLPs from the community. Dr. McLeod enthusiastically engaged this wide audience and shared her insights on supporting multilingual children’s speech.
Ben Pham, a recipient of the Australian Awards Scholarship, is currently completing her fourth year in the PhD program under Dr. McLeod. She presented with Dr. Giang Pham and Dr. Sharynne McLeod on the latest clinical research on Vietnamese children’s speech and language development with a focus on finding potential markers for impairments. These findings were also shared at an invited seminar at the 2017 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Convention in Los Angeles, which makes it such a privilege to have these speakers here at San Diego State University.
2017 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Convention
Every year, ASHA organizes a professional conference that provides attendees with opportunities to learn about the latest research and clinical resources. This year, BDC lab members conducted three presentations.
Dr. Pham, Dr. Sharynne McLeod of Charles Sturt University, and Ben Pham, a PhD Student at Charles Sturt University gave an invited one-hour seminar titled, "Vietnamese Children’s Speech and Language: Latest Clinical Research." This presentation attracted a large crowd of SLPs who work with Vietnamese clients.
Dr. Pham, Dr. Kerry Ebert, and Quynh Dam presented a poster titled, "Introducing a Nonword Repetition (NWR) Task for Vietnamese-Speaking Children." This study focused on the development and validation of a Vietnamese NWR task that can be used to screen Vietnamese-speaking children’s phonological memory skills.
Dr. Pham and Tim Tipton, SLP at San Diego Unified School District, presented a poster titled "Child-Internal & External Factors Supporting First vs. Second Language Development." This study examined which factors supported Vietnamese and English vocabulary outcomes in bilingual children during the early school years.
Society for Advancing Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) Conference 2017 and the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) Conference 2017
BDC Lab’s very own Kristine Thuy Dinh, an Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD) scholar, presented research from this lab on creating the Vietnamese nonword repetition task and on children’s performance on this task at two different conferences, SACNAS and ABRCMS. The 2017 SACNAS: The National Diversity in STEM Conference, was held in Salt Lake City, Utah from October 19-21 while the ABRCMS Conference was held in Phoenix, Arizona from November 1-4.
At both events, Kristine was able to network with other undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members from other universities, and prestigious professionals including brain surgeons, astronauts, Nobel Prize winners, and more. “Meeting successful individuals who come from low-income, undocumented, disabled, or first generation backgrounds at the SACNAS and ABRCMS conferences inspires me to think that anything is possible,” stated Kristine. Through meeting these inspiring individuals, she realized that her education in statistics could be applied in ways she had never thought of before, such as studying outer space with NASA or researching music.
When it came to presenting, the hard work paid off as Kristine was awarded an outstanding research award for her poster presentation at the ABRCMS conference. The BDC is proud of lab member Kristine Thuy Dinh for achieving all that she has and all that she will.
Speech-Language Awareness & Information Day (SAID)
SAID is a community event that raises awareness about speech and language impairments and resources for affected individuals, their families, friends, and allied professionals in the San Diego area. The event is free and open to the public. It offers a community resource fair, a keynote presentation, along with other presenters, and an expert panel for questions.
As a San Diego State University SLHS research lab, we share with attendees what the BDC lab is about, what we study, and how the outcome and results will help the community. In doing so, we are able to talk directly to SLPs, parents, and related professionals about bilingual language development and disorders.
This event is co-sponsored by the SDSU Chapter of the National Student Speech-Language and Hearing Association (NSSLHA) and the SDSU School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences (SLHS).
