Tools

Speech and language therapy gets its tools from a wide variety of fields. The first and last of these fields is linguistics, not bells and whistles.

Three of the pioneers in speech and language pathology were the Reverend William Holder, John Thelwall, and Alexander Melville Bell. working over the period from the 1660s to the late 1900s, starting long before the term, linguistics, came into use. More recently there is the theoretical and empirical research pioneered by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s and now developed by a huge worldwide community of scholarship working in almost all fields of linguistics, now dominant in many of these fields, but not in clinical linguistics, as commonly understood.

It is important to recognise that Chomsky’s tradition of linguistics started long BEFORE what is sometimes characterised as the ‘constructivist’ tradition represented by William Croft (2002, 2004, 2010), Ben Ambridge (2004, 2010) and others . Efforts to represent Chomsky’s tradition as some sort of interloper seem to me just historically wrong. The history is the other way round.

Knowing only of Chomsky’s work, not knowing any of that of any of the pioneers, as I characterise them here, in 1983 I developed the same notion of giving children ‘pretend words’ to say in a highly structured sequence, but with the natural stress contours of English, as described here under the heading of Possible words.

The therapy aspect here has recently been misrepresented by what seem to me like some very unfortunate shenanigans.

Going back long before the work of the pioneers of speech and language pathology, and other modern areas of study including anthropology, psychology, sociology, there have been significant explorations and investigations in linguistics, from the invention of what quickly became the modern alphabet, about 3,200 years ago in the Middle East, continuing in India and ancient Greece.