25-Year Club welcomes the class of 1984

Tonight the university celebrates a crowd of staff and faculty members who started work here in the ominous-sounding year of 1984, and ended up making a career out of it.

It’s the annual gathering of the 25-Year Club, at which 53 people — including a dean, two grounds crew foremen, and the secretaries to two vice-presidents — will be congratulated and presented with gifts. They join hundreds of other long-service employees who will also attend tonight’s party in the Physical Activities Complex.

The 25-Year Club was launched in 1982, when the university reached its own quarter-century mark and honoured the employees who had arrived in the birth year of 1957 and were still on hand. Others have been added to the Club each year since then.

Now it’s the turn of the 1984 arrivals, those who were hired in the year Canada had three prime ministers, the year of “Ghostbusters”, the year Edmonton won its first Stanley Cup, the year the Apple Macintosh was introduced.

At UW in 1984 — well, let Simon the Troll tell a little of the story: “UW's omnipresent Big Brother was the Institute for Computer Research, which reached into all parts of campus to distribute electronic largesse and enlist faculty, staff and students in the movement towards high-tech unison. Oldthinkers were swept along in the rush, as one faculty after another appointed its first ‘associate dean (computing)’, and even the library began marching in the same direction, with the news that it would soon close the ‘card’ catalogue, replacing it with electronic access to books.

“The excitement was highest in May, when big announcements kept coming, one on the heels of another. Oxford University Press had chosen Waterloo to manage the computerization of the Oxford English Dictionary — yes! Digital Equipment Corporation would give UW $25 million worth of computing hardware over four years, including some machinery that hadn't even been invented yet — yes! The Ontario government would provide millions of dollars toward the cost of a computer research building — yes! Hewlett-Packard would set up a major facility in the soon-to-be-a-reality research park on the north campus — yes! (Well, no, actually, as things turned out; that one never came true.)” And pictured above is president Doug Wright welcoming the launch of spinoff company Watcom.

Here are the arrivals of 1984, the newest members of UW's 25-Year Club:

Tonight’s gala event, which starts at 6:00, will also honour the 35-year veterans who came to Waterloo in 1974 and are still serving as staff or faculty. Their names:

The 25-Year Club event is organized by the human resources department (information, ext. 32078).

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Researchers set standards for child speech

a news release from the UW media relations office

A new parent questionnaire, developed at UW, will help health practitioners to more accurately gauge the acquisition of language skills in children with autism. The pioneering Language Use Inventory (LUI) is among a set of measures for evaluating spoken language development in children with autism spectrum disorders, recommended by an expert panel.

The experts' report, Defining Spoken Language Benchmarks and Selecting Measures of Expressive Language Development for Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, appears in the June 2009 issue of the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research. The report was commissioned by the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

"This is very exciting news," said psychology professor Daniela O'Neill, who created the LUI. "This report will be of tremendous help to researchers, clinicians and speech-language professionals involved in intervention with young children with autism and we are very proud to see the LUI included among the measures recommended for evaluating the efficacy of interventions that target spoken language."

The LUI is a standardized questionnaire that asks parents about their child's use of language in many different kinds of settings. Research from the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S. suggests the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders to be one in 150 children.

"The LUI looks at pragmatic language development which has do with how young children are able to use their language effectively and successfully in everyday interactions with other people in ways that are age-appropriate and typical," O'Neill explained. "For example, to ask for help, comment about noticeable things, tease, tell stories and give others information they might need. The pragmatics of language can be an area of great difficulty for children with autism."

Difficulty with learning language and communicating with others is often one of the first things that parents become concerned about. Parents have much valuable information on their child's language use to share with professionals evaluating their child. "A parent has had the most experience watching their child try to use their language in a host of different settings and with many different people."

The LUI provides speech-language pathologists and researchers with a new tool to evaluate a young child's broad pragmatic use of language. As many as 14 per cent of preschool-age children in Canada and the U.S. may be at risk for language disorders.

The LUI is the product of more than eight years of research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The development of the inventory included a large-scale study in which more than 3,500 parents from across Canada completed the questionnaire describing their child's language ability.

"This study will help us understand unexplored ways of identifying language skills in children with autism," said Michael Kramer, scientific director at the CIHR. "Our support for the development of the Language Use Inventory helps keep us on the forefront of research on autism in young children. This research will also provide unprecedented insight into language acquisition in typically developing Canadian children as well as those with communication disorders and other disabilities."

The LUI allows a comparison of a child's score with children of the same age — similar to height and weight charts used by family doctors. Family practitioners in the Kitchener-Waterloo area are involved in preliminary studies looking at its use in doctor's offices. "Both doctors and parents are enthusiastic about the possibility of learning more about how a child's language is progressing relative to peers of the same age through a friendly and easy-to-use questionnaire, such as the LUI," O'Neill said.

"The tremendous response we had from parents all across Canada has allowed us to provide norms for the LUI at every month from 18 to 47 months of age," she said. "We were amazed by how eager so many parents were to take part. I think the issue of how children learn language is just as fascinating to parents as to researchers and also many parents can relate to the anxiety of wondering if perhaps a child is experiencing language difficulties or may be falling significantly behind their peers."

CAR

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