April 2003
Volume 16, Number 4
Linda Polka is an associate professor in the school of communication sciences and disorders at McGill University. She is also the interim director of McGill's inter-disciplinary doctoral program in language acquisition. Polka received her PhD in experimental psychology, and completed the academic and clinical practica to become a clinical audiologist at the University of South Florida in 1989. Her research has examined how language experience shapes the development of speech perception.
As an under-graduate I was immediately attracted to psychology but I had other interests and also completed minors in natural sciences and in Japanese studies.
In my last year of undergraduate studies, I participated in a special Japanese studies program sponsored by Toyota Corporation. The program, in which each student was from a different academic discipline, involved Japanese language training, courses and intensive workshops on Japanese culture, and a study/tour in Japan.
Looking back, this experience was more than fun and, in fact, shaped my future in two ways. I became energized to learn more about the complexities of learning to speak a new language. I also learned to value cross-disciplinary interactions by working closely with individuals who shared a common interest but had different perspectives. This experience guided me to a research area that I love and led me to pursue an interdisciplinary doctoral program integrating experimental psychology and clinical audiology.
Today, I am an associate professor in the school of communication sciences and disorders at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Our department provides clinical training in speech-language pathology at the master's level and research training at both the master's and doctoral level. I contribute to training of our students through teaching and research supervision. My major line of research examines how language experience shapes the development of speech perception. This work focuses on early development and involves comparing infants who are learning different languages in different language contexts (monolingual versus bilingual families).
Montreal is the perfect city to pursue my research, being one of the most linguistically diverse communities in North America, with two major languages (French and English), several large minority language groups, and many smaller minority groups. I also have an ideal academic environment for language research and clinical training. Within my department, I have 8 colleagues with expertise in diverse areas of language and we share the common goal of advancing knowledge in ways that can serve the needs of the communicatively impaired. Our department and university also form the core of a broader network of expertise on language, speech, and auditory perception across Montreal. The McGill Centre for Language, Mind, and Brain (www.crlmb.mcgill.ca) was recently established to recognize and support this unique and vibrant world-class language research network.
So, how did I get here? Psychology remained my home base for a long time and it is within this discipline that I initially found my research area. I entered a PhD program in experimental psychology at the University of Minnesota with a general interest in human perception and cognition. Fortunately for my advisor-to-be and me, I recognized the interests and abilities in my application to be the makings of a future speech researcher. His intuitions were right. The first week of graduate school he showed me some speech spectrograms and told me about some of the speech perception work in progress in the Minnesota Speech perception lab. I was hooked!
I started working in the speech perception lab immediately and have worked in this area ever since. It was also my good fortune to be in the Minnesota psychology department, which has a strong tradition of nurturing cross-disciplinary interactions and collaborations. I became involved with the Speech Perception Group, which included psychologists, speech-language pathologists, audiologists, and computer scientists and electrical engineers. These cross-disciplinary interactions were not always comfortable because individuals did not always agree or even understand each other but this tension stimulated thinking and promoted innovative collaboration. I learned a great deal participating in this group. Near the end of my first year at Minnesota my advisors, James Jenkins and Winifred Strange, announced that they were moving (and taking the lab) to the University of South Florida. Also, at South Florida they were establishing a new interdisciplinary doctoral program in experimental psychology and communication sciences and disorders. I followed my advisors and became the first graduate of this new program.
At USF I completed the academic and clinical practica required to practice as a clinical audiologist along with the experimental psychology program. Although I was interested in pursuing basic scientific research, I wanted to broaden my thinking and to think about research with respect to clinical implications or applications. This clinical training made me more knowledgeable about real problems faced by individual with hearing loss, and speech and language disorders and current solutions to these problems. I also enjoyed the challenges and rewards of clinical problem solving. After finishing my doctorate, I crossed the border to Canada to do postdoctoral work (supported by NIH) with Janet Werker in the infant speech perception lab in the psychology department at the University of British Columbia. I was hired by McGill before I started my postdoc.
At McGill, I teach courses in our clinical master's program and pursue research on speech perception development as well as some work on clinical assessment of hearing loss. I am also the interim director of the McGill University inter-disciplinary doctoral program in language acquisition (www.psych.mcgill.ca/lap). My research collaborators have included psychologists, speech scientists, linguists, audiologists, and otolaryngologists. At McGill, my connections with the psychology department include research collaborations and supervision of undergraduate research projects. I also hire psychology undergraduates in my lab.
For me, there are two major advantages of being in a communication disorders department. First, I have more colleagues closer to my own research interests than I would have in a traditional psychology department. Second, it is generally easier to involve CSD students in my research because they have the most appropriate background, having studied acoustic phonetics, language development, and speech science.
Every choice has some drawbacks. It is more demanding and often takes more time to complete both clinical and research training programs. In recent years, CSD faculty (including ours) have worked to structure doctoral programs that facilitate combining clinical and research training, but it is still hard to do both well without extending the time to graduation. On the bright side, the current academic job market for PhDs with research skills and clinical training (in speech pathology or audiology) is excellent. However, beyond graduate school, it is also challenging to track developments in a research field and a clinical profession simultaneously, especially when both are rapidly evolving. There is no simple, one-fits-all solution to this dilemma. You have to find a strategy for balancing these demands that works for you and satisfies your career aspirations. Myself, I do not work clinically at present but teaching in a clinical department helps me keep abreast of major advances in clinical audiology. Supervising clinically-oriented student projects also helps me stay actively involved in the field.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that I am so clever that I planned or even anticipated the many steps along my career path. I believe that a graduate program designed to build scientific thinking and problem solving through research provides basic skills that can be extended in many directions. My PhD in experimental psychology did that for me. If I could go back in time, I would still invest the extra time and effort to become a clinical audiologist. Without this expertise my research and teaching would be less meaningful and I would have fewer career options. I also anticipate that I will eventually shift my attention to solving problems more directly related to hearing loss. Although crossing academic lines can be challenging, but it can also be very rewarding.
