Who She Is
Li-Rong Lilly Cheng came to the United States from China and built a career that changed how speech-language pathology thinks about who it is actually for. As a professor at San Diego State University, she spent decades pushing a field largely built around monolingual, English-speaking clients to reckon with a much wider world. Cheng argued that an SLP working with a bilingual child or a family from a different cultural background cannot simply apply a standard assessment and call it done, because doing so risks misdiagnosing a difference as a disorder. She authored and edited books, trained clinicians, and helped build frameworks for multicultural and multilingual practice that are now woven into how SLPs are educated across the country. Her work means that families from diverse backgrounds are far more likely to receive care that actually makes sense for their lives.
Why She Matters
For much of speech pathology's history, linguistic and cultural diversity was an afterthought in clinical training, and Cheng spent her career changing that. Her advocacy means that a child growing up bilingual is less likely to be incorrectly flagged as having a language disorder simply because they were assessed in their weaker language. She also opened the door for a more diverse generation of SLPs to see their own backgrounds not as incidental to the work, but as some of the most valuable things they can bring to their clients. Her influence is felt every time an SLP pauses to ask whether their assessment truly reflects what a client knows and can do. For young people from multilingual or multicultural backgrounds considering this career, her story makes one thing clear: everything you have lived is a professional asset.
