SLPs with strong accents..

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Hi,

I want to know what your opinion is about seeing an SLP with a thick (non-native) accent ? Would you hesitate to do this ? Or would this not be an issue at all ?

(I don't mean to cause any controversies, and would appreciate frank answers - even if not politically correct. If anyone does not feel like answering this publicly, please pm me. I ask for a reason, thanks) !

It seems reasonable to be concerned if the SLP (speech language pathologist?) is trying to teach your kid to speak and has a heavy accent. If you have a hard time understanding what he/she is saying, then your child probably does, too. Also, you don't want your kid to start talking in an unusual accent that you then have to try and modify.
My husband used to have such a heavy accent that I had to act as an "interpreter" for him even though he was speaking English. I thought it was beautiful, but it did make things somewhat difficult for him. To this day he will not pull up to a gas pump marked "3" because his pronunciation of that number confuses the clerk.

If the SLP is focusing on getting interaction going, it might not be that much of a problem. The main thing would be can the therapist engage his attention and promote some kind of communication. If it's articulation, it depends how bad it is and what is being taught. My son had an SLP who was originally from Russia or one of the Baltic states. Her english vowels were fairly accented, but it didn't pose any problems for her to teach /th/ and l- and r- blends to my son. If your son is heavily echolochaic, his repeating the SLP's accent might be an issue...

Well, the accent I am referring to / thinking of is a heavy Sub-continent accent, which can be very hard to understand (especially when the individual speaks really fast -- not on purpose but the person is a naturally fast talker). So, this would be a no-go, right ?

Thank you both for your feedback.

Listen, I think most of us recognize that the politically correct answer should be "no, it doesn't matter."

But sometimes I think it does. And if you think it does in this case, then you should request a new therapist and not feel bad. I would explain that it has nothing to do with the therapist as a person or even with her skills, but it does have to do with the fact that your son is having difficulty learning language to begin with and you do not want to add another layer of difficulty.

When my daughter was first learning to speak, I would have not wanted a therapist who had ANY issue that made communication more difficult. She wasn't even processing everything that was said to her. How would adding an additional level of difficulty help her at her rudimentary stages?

And I look at it this way: I have barely passable Spanish skills. I learned from a woman from Mexico. When I lived on the west coast, I did OK. When I first came to the east coast and was exposed to people from the Caribbean, I couldn't understand what they were saying, even though I "knew" the words. For example, I knew what eScuela was (school), but when I heard people talking about eh-cuela, I thought it was a whole different word, so I didn't know what it meant. And because my ability to understand Spanish was based on picking up on what I knew and trying to string together the in between parts that I didn't understand, the more the new accent "took away" words I did know, the less I was able to comprehend.

I always had a sense that that was what was happening with my daughter when she was first learning to speak. Communicating--in and of itself--was a second language to her. All of it. Every aspect. So any single disrupting variable made it that much more difficult for her.

My personal opinion...she may be able to do her job quite well...but perhaps just not with your son. Not all people who require the services of an SLP have the same issues. For example, for my son, who has pragmatic language problems, her accent would pose no problem at all.

I don't know if this will help you or not, but I think in some way it touches what I think is making you feel uncomfortable.

My daughter's SLP was missing an arm. She told me right up front that many parents did not want her working with their kids because of it. Honestly, I think that is horrible. For one thing, it was EI, and in my experience, little kids are THE MOST accepting of others disabilities of anyone, especially if the adults around them act like it is no big deal. My uncle has a physical deformity that is very noticeable, but none of my cousins, and none of our kids, have ever cared about it at all. So for parents of kids with a disability to discriminate against her because of her own disability...well, I find that shameful. Her disability had no impact on her ability as a SLP. What's really funny is she wasn't skilled as an SLP and was largely a waste of our time, but I felt too bad to turn her away, so she wasted our time for years.

I think what I am trying to say is, I really "get" the uncomfortable feeling of wondering if you are discriminating or in some other way being unfair, but in this case, if you believe her accent is making it more difficult for your son to work with her, it is completely different. She is working with him directly on communication. If anything about her is making communication with your son more difficult, then I think you need to say so. Therapy is a big investment (whether or not you pay for it).

So not at all to detract from any of the other advice - I do think they could be right! - I just want to share my recent experience. After not finding an EI SLP for a while, we were assigned to a woman with an accent and who I also (unrelated) just did not take a liking to right off the bat. But you know what? After a couple of weeks, I realized she was doing more for my daughter than any other SLP had done! Now, my daughter's articulation is a little bit funky but not ridiculously far behind, so she was really focusing on social aspects of language. It was in these sessions that I first heard my daughter (with prompts) ask for help and call someone's name before speaking to them. So again, that had nothing to do with the SLP having an accent or not, but I'm just wondering what your goals are for speech and if this is the right person to meet those goals. For us, it was OK for articulation to take the back burner for a bit while this woman with an accent who is exceptionally good at drawing out social language worked with my daughter.

I have seen this amazing therapist on youtube with a thick southern accent so it depends on the school
really.

I had a friend whose nurse tell me her school wouldn't let continue SPL studies because of accent
I didn't think her accent was that thick "She was not a native English speaker"
I would loved to have her at the time even if my child ended up with a slight accent.
I ended up doing a lot of the work myself because the amount and quality provided by my kids school was sub par.

I have had a wide spectrum in the quality of STs at the school. If the best ST had an accent, I still would have preferred her hands-down to the 2nd best, not to mention the last really bad one who was actually a net minus.

So, I guess what I am saying is it depends on how much control you have in vetting the person. If the school district is providing the service, you have to ask yourself who they could potentially give you instead, and could it be worse.

If you are choosing and paying for the ST (or your insurance is paying) then if you are unhappy, you can interview other STs and see if you like someone else better.

Me, personally, I would not care if my son ended up with a foreign accent for a little bit. If the problem I was most concerned about was proper articulation, I would feel differently. If the issue was social and pragmatic, I wouldn't worry so much.

For a non-verbal child, I am not sure whether exposure to different accents might be a bad thing, or a good thing. I would be concerned if I felt it increased the complexity of the interaction, but on the other hand, I think it might help later down the road, especially if the child were to ever have an international TA or prof. We prune our neurons based on sounds we hear, and maybe people who are not exposed to different sounds have more trouble later on.

I had a few profs/TAs who were from different places, and it took me a little while to adjust to their speech. Some of the students had way more trouble than I did, and I suspect that they were exposed to a more homogeneous language pool than I was. I am not multilingual, but I grew up in a place with a myriad of different accents.

TL:DR I know that is some long term stuff, so you may not care about that. My aspieness just provoked me to mention it, anyway. Apologies if it is too off-topic.

I would agree that it depends on what you're paying them to do and whether it adds another layer of difficulty for the child.

Personally, I think a heavy accent would make it difficult to teach articulation, unless they were working heavily with single phonemes or recorded exercises. I don't know what effect a heavy accent would have on getting a nonverbal child to the point of talking. It might be soothing and make it easier; it might be more confusing and make it difficult.

I agree that, for the social and pragmatic use of language, it should be a non-issue. If anything, learning to converse with someone with a noticeable accent is a social language skill (as is politely saying, "I didn't understand you, can you please repeat that"). IMO, after going to college and being deeply embarrassed at the range of accents I couldn't readily understand, that one is a case of "the sooner, the better."

Even if it just *gasp* makes you personally uncomfortable, that's something to consider. Your kid is going to lose benefits if you are too busy being uncomfortable to give full focus to what needs to be done. If that's racist, or accent-ist, or otherwise ethnocentric, so be it. I guess we should all be dancing around singing "It's A Small World After All," but that's not the way human psychology works.

Please bear in mind that this is coming from a woman with an Ozark-Appalachian accent that varies in thickness anywhere from "vestigial cute" to "just crawled out of The Grapes of Wrath, with a mouthful of marbles." A woman with said accent who once dismissed an SLP (for my tongue-tied then-three-year-old) out of hand because she smilingly reassured me that SHE had to spend six months with an SLP to get rid of her Wisconsin accent before she could get a job. I thought, "Jesus, lady, I'm going for 'speech that is readily intelligible to non-family-members,' not 'news anchor.' We're not living in a dystopian novel YET. Bugger off."

My $0.02 may, therefore, be an entire nickel...

...or a counterfeit half-penny.