81 year old Professor Emeritus spends retirement continuing important research

Meet Dr. Philip Dale. If you didn't know him before, you definitely will now. At 81-years-old, the Professor Emeritus in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences has spent his 10 years of retirement so far with his head in the books collaborating on research worldwide and creating measures to help understand children and how they learn to speak.

While Dale may not be in a classroom at The University of New Mexico anymore, he surprises friends, family, and his UNM colleagues, showing no sign of slowing down in his 80's.

While Dale describes himself as a Developmental Psychologist in children's language development, he didn't start in that field six decades ago. Dale earned his bachelor's in Mathematics from The University of Chicago in 1963. A few years later, as studying child language flourished in America, he shifted from math and computers toward psychology and linguistics earning his Ph.D. at The University of Michigan in Communication Sciences.

From there, Dale taught Psychology at The University of Washington for many years eventually moving to The University of Missouri where he sat as Chair in their Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences. His experience in the Midwest later landed him at UNM in 2006 where he was named Chair of the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences on campus in Albuquerque.

Dale says New Mexico was where he knew he wanted to retire, not only because of the weather and beauty but because of the state's linguistically rich area. While he enjoyed his time as Chair and faculty, Dale says his energy wasn't what it used to be, and grading papers became less of a pleasure. He retired from UNM in 2014 at 71 but a decade's worth of retirement hasn't stopped him from continuing what he loves. Between his home, Zimmerman Library, and local coffee shops, Dale still works on his collaborations and nearly half a dozen projects a year.

"At last count, I had something over 50 publications since I retired and that amazed me, I didn't realize. It didn't feel like I was working that hard," Dale said. "It's not what I expected, my career, especially the second half of it. It's been much more rewarding than I ever could have realized."

Dale has been involved in numerous projects over the years with UNM colleagues and others in the UK, Denmark, and Japan among others trying to understand why children differ and what happens in their development from 2 to 16 years old. One of the core projects in his career was more than 25 years ago with a group of researchers who were out to answer a problem: How do you measure young kids? Dale said they revived an older method called the "Parent Report."

"We showed if you do the right research and ask the questions carefully while analyzing the data properly, parents are remarkably good reporters," Dale said. "They're better in a lot of ways, not just because they have more experience with their kids, but they have more diverse experience with their kids. They also make it practical to study larger numbers of children."

Dale said the instrument became more successful than ever imagined, especially in clinical work and cross-linguistic research. He believes there are nearly 60 to 70 versions of this instrument now used around the world and more are being developed to help with many languages where there weren't many tools before.

"We have measures from about eight months to almost 4-years-old, which not only allows for parents to give us good information, but we also have enough information that we have true norms for the first time," Dale said. "We can say one child is in the 70th percentile, above average, and another is in the 7th percentile, which means there's good reason to be concerned."

During his retirement, Dale has most recently been working on an assessment of language disorders for Spanish-speaking individuals. According to the United States Census Bureau, Spanish is the most common non-English language spoken in America.

"Our research group developed these instruments and obtained norms for evaluating children," he said. "Now, we have these instruments people can use in the United States for evaluating a child's Spanish, whether monolingual or bilingual."

Even in retirement, Dale is making a difference in his community, state, country, and even around the globe with his collaborative work. While Dale says he's slowed down a bit since retirement, he has no intentions of stopping anytime soon.