Miller Clinic expands bilingual reach across full lifespan

Fort Worth, TX

5/21/2008

The minority population is expanding — and so is TCU’s Miller Speech and Hearing Clinic. Long known for its speech pathology work with bilingual children, the clinic is now setting itself apart with bilingual speech pathology training for the full lifespan.

“We really are looking at a lifespan perspective, preparing students to work with non-English speakers and bilinguals from birth to old age — and that’s not something that’s offered at many other programs nationwide,” said Maria L. Muñoz, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, who joined the department in 2006 as an associate professor. “We are one of the oldest bilingual programs, one of the most longstanding, and I think we have tremendous loyalty from the bilingual speech pathology community in the area.”

The Miller Speech and Hearing Clinic — the training site for upper level undergraduate and graduate students in TCU’s communication sciences and disorders program in the Harris College of Nursing and Health Sciences — offers a variety of speech, language and hearing screening, evaluation and therapy services to the local community. Undergraduate and graduate students provide the services under the direction of faculty members.

William J. Ryan, Ph.D., CCC-SLP, retiring chair of the communication sciences and disorders department and director of the Miller Clinic, credits Muñoz with the expanded services for bilingual adults.

“Having her here makes a huge difference,” he said, noting that previously, bilingual students’ work with Spanish-speaking clients was concentrated mostly on children. “Dr. Muñoz’s expertise is working with adults who have had strokes and who have communication problems resulting from those strokes — especially people who are Spanish speaking or bilingual. Having her here, we can now cover all the way from very young children to elderly patients, and that allows our bilingual students to get training across the entire lifespan.”

Miller Clinic continues to work with bilingual children through local Head Start programs. During fall ’06 to spring ’07, the clinic completed 129 child screenings at four Head Start daycare centers, 17 full evaluations and 110 hours of therapy for 14 different students, Ryan noted.

“We haven’t changed too much, but the goal is to develop an on-site adult bilingual clinic,” Muñoz said. “So I’ve been working more on networking with the community. I’ll be giving a talk for community speech pathologists on aphasia in Spanish speakers as a way to connect with the community to encourage referrals of patients to our clinic.”

Muñoz hopes to get one or two bilingual adult patients by spring and by fall have a more established program that could see six to 10 patients a semester, depending on patients’ needs. “I’ll focus more on the adults with aphasia, but the other faculty members are also interested in providing services to bilingual adults,” she said.

Timing couldn’t be better. Texas is now one of four states — along with Washington, D.C. — that is “majority-minority.” In 2006, the state’s population was 52 percent minority, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and it accounted for the second largest Hispanic population among states with 8.4 million.

The Census Bureau estimates 23.9 percent of the Tarrant County and 36.4 percent of the Dallas County populations were Hispanic or Latino in 2005. Some 29 percent of Texas residents speak Spanish at home — leading all states — and a whopping 78 percent of Hispanics age 5 and up speak a language other than English at home, according to the 2005 American Community Survey.

But for all the hurdles they must clear, the language barrier won’t be one of them for Spanish-speaking speech pathology clients at the Miller Clinic — where students are truly bilingually trained.

“There are bilingual speech pathologists, but then there are those who are bilingual and bilingually trained — trained in the unique needs of individuals who are bilingual or non-English speakers,” Muñoz said. “Our students are coming out bilingually trained. They have an understanding of the unique diagnostic features, developmental issues and treatment options that are specific to non-English speakers and bilinguals. And that’s an important distinction.”