Professor Elizabeth Peña receives ASHA's highest honor
By Carol Jean Tomoguchi-Perez
December 10, 2024
December 10, 2024
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On December 6, UC Irvine School of Education Professor Elizabeth Peña celebrated a remarkable achievement, receiving the Honors of the Association award from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). This prestigious recognition, the highest honor bestowed by ASHA, highlights Dr. Peña’s distinguished contributions to the field of communication sciences and disorders. Dr. Peña's groundbreaking research in bilingualism, language impairment, language development, and assessment bias and measurement has transformed and continues to shape practices in speech-language pathology.
In this Q&A, we delve into Dr. Peña’s inspiring career, her groundbreaking research, and the journey that led to this well-deserved honor. Q: Congratulations on receiving the Honors of the Association from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association! What does this recognition mean to you personally and professionally? |
Elizabeth Peña (right) at the awards ceremony
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A: Thank you – I am honored and humbled by this award. It means a lot to me. I am the child of immigrants. I learned how to speak English alongside my mom when I started kindergarten. That was formative in developing my interest in what it means to know more than one language. I had to navigate two languages and also two cultural contexts where the rules and expectations were different. Professionally, my mission has been to do better for bilingual kids. Bilingual children are misidentified for developmental language disorder (DLD) at a very high rate. At times they are identified as having DLD if they have language differences, which are a natural outcome of learning a second language. On the other hand, they are under-identified or identified late because the profiles of DLD they present are misinterpreted as language differences or as a “bilingual delay.” There is no such thing as a bilingual delay!
You also recently received the Distinguished Faculty Award for Mentorship. What does mentoring mean to you, and what do you find most rewarding about supporting students and emerging scholars?
It is fun, rewarding and an honor to work with students, emerging scholars and early career faculty. They are the future of the profession and society; they think of things and invent things that we cannot imagine. It’s that spark of connection and collaboration; building on each other’s ideas, challenging, improving, and refining them to develop something that none of us, alone, would have done. That’s the point at which I think, Wow! This is amazing – this is what it’s all about.
A few years ago I was at SXSW (South by Southwest) and saw the film “Sound City” by Dave Grohl. During the film's Q&A, an audience member asked Grohl when he realized that Nirvana was bigger than him. And he said, “I am the luckiest person in the world, I make music with other people…collaborating is what it’s all about… when Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age picks up a guitar and I pick up my drumsticks, killer (expletive) happens.” For me, it is an honor to be part of a large network of mentors, researchers, clinicians, and students. Collaborating with colleagues at different career stages is the best feeling in the world – and yes, killer (expletive) happens.
Your work focuses on bilingualism, language impairment, and assessment bias – what inspired you to pursue these areas, and how have you seen the field evolve over the years?
I started studying bilingualism in this field at a time when bilinguals were excluded from studies because it would mess up the results. As a clinician, I consulted with school districts who were overidentifying bilingual children with DLD when they were typically developing. In talking to speech-language pathologists (SLPs) at the time, there was limited understanding that perhaps standardized measures weren’t appropriate, or that translated measures would not be valid. I think this has changed tremendously in the field. We have a much greater awareness of bilingualism and knowledge of appropriate diagnostic practices. I’ve worked on the development of diagnostic practices including dynamic and bilingual assessment. Now, many of these procedures are a routine part of clinical practice.
What advice would you give to aspiring scholars, doctoral students, and early career faculty who share the same research areas as you, and are passionate about making a difference in bilingualism and speech-language pathology?
It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day stuff. Some of it matters, but a lot of it doesn’t. So, learn to tell the difference. Share your work broadly, share stuff in progress, and give credit where credit is due. Don’t be a jerk! The greatest superpower I have is a network of colleagues and friends in my field. Build these, share ideas, and collaborate. It’s way more fun to do things together than alone.
What do you hope to accomplish in the next five years, career-wise? In the next 10 years?
Although we have made a lot of progress in bilingual assessment and better measures for DLD, there’s still a practice gap. I’d say most bilingual SLPs know about assessment bias and about different kinds of assessments they can employ, and as a group they tend to stay on top of the literature and current practices. Much of it is because there aren’t a lot of options for the bilingual kids they serve. But, there are very few bilingual SLPs – less than eight percent. Still, I think we need to better understand how clinicians use these measures and what decisions they make once they’ve been tested. We need to improve intervention strategies for bilingual kids. We need to develop measures and approaches that monolingual English speakers can use. I’m working on a National Institutes of Health project right now that is focused on the development of such a measure where we index children’s level of English exposure to identify items that would differentiate DLD for children with that level of exposure. This is a more personalized approach that has a lot of potential. The future might also leverage the power of automated speech recognition and machine learning approaches in doing bilingual assessments.
You also recently received the Distinguished Faculty Award for Mentorship. What does mentoring mean to you, and what do you find most rewarding about supporting students and emerging scholars?
It is fun, rewarding and an honor to work with students, emerging scholars and early career faculty. They are the future of the profession and society; they think of things and invent things that we cannot imagine. It’s that spark of connection and collaboration; building on each other’s ideas, challenging, improving, and refining them to develop something that none of us, alone, would have done. That’s the point at which I think, Wow! This is amazing – this is what it’s all about.
A few years ago I was at SXSW (South by Southwest) and saw the film “Sound City” by Dave Grohl. During the film's Q&A, an audience member asked Grohl when he realized that Nirvana was bigger than him. And he said, “I am the luckiest person in the world, I make music with other people…collaborating is what it’s all about… when Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age picks up a guitar and I pick up my drumsticks, killer (expletive) happens.” For me, it is an honor to be part of a large network of mentors, researchers, clinicians, and students. Collaborating with colleagues at different career stages is the best feeling in the world – and yes, killer (expletive) happens.
Your work focuses on bilingualism, language impairment, and assessment bias – what inspired you to pursue these areas, and how have you seen the field evolve over the years?
I started studying bilingualism in this field at a time when bilinguals were excluded from studies because it would mess up the results. As a clinician, I consulted with school districts who were overidentifying bilingual children with DLD when they were typically developing. In talking to speech-language pathologists (SLPs) at the time, there was limited understanding that perhaps standardized measures weren’t appropriate, or that translated measures would not be valid. I think this has changed tremendously in the field. We have a much greater awareness of bilingualism and knowledge of appropriate diagnostic practices. I’ve worked on the development of diagnostic practices including dynamic and bilingual assessment. Now, many of these procedures are a routine part of clinical practice.
What advice would you give to aspiring scholars, doctoral students, and early career faculty who share the same research areas as you, and are passionate about making a difference in bilingualism and speech-language pathology?
It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day stuff. Some of it matters, but a lot of it doesn’t. So, learn to tell the difference. Share your work broadly, share stuff in progress, and give credit where credit is due. Don’t be a jerk! The greatest superpower I have is a network of colleagues and friends in my field. Build these, share ideas, and collaborate. It’s way more fun to do things together than alone.
What do you hope to accomplish in the next five years, career-wise? In the next 10 years?
Although we have made a lot of progress in bilingual assessment and better measures for DLD, there’s still a practice gap. I’d say most bilingual SLPs know about assessment bias and about different kinds of assessments they can employ, and as a group they tend to stay on top of the literature and current practices. Much of it is because there aren’t a lot of options for the bilingual kids they serve. But, there are very few bilingual SLPs – less than eight percent. Still, I think we need to better understand how clinicians use these measures and what decisions they make once they’ve been tested. We need to improve intervention strategies for bilingual kids. We need to develop measures and approaches that monolingual English speakers can use. I’m working on a National Institutes of Health project right now that is focused on the development of such a measure where we index children’s level of English exposure to identify items that would differentiate DLD for children with that level of exposure. This is a more personalized approach that has a lot of potential. The future might also leverage the power of automated speech recognition and machine learning approaches in doing bilingual assessments.
