About

Profession

I am a Speech and Language Therapist, registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (Registration SL042869). I qualified as a Speech and Language Therapist in 1979, going on to work in the NHS. I treated a broad range of issues. I then went on to do a PhD at the University of Durham. I am now returning to practice and specialising in helping children who do not talk at all or whose talk is less precise than might be expected, who are hard or impossible to understand, or who have problems with reading and writing. Significantly, many children have problems in more than one of these areas. In many cases it may seem that the process of learning to talk has somehow stopped or failed. More technically such issues relate to what is known as the ‘learnability space‘. This falls within the scope of clinical linguistics. I also write and carry out research. (See References). According to my research, a linguistic focus speeds things up in therapy.

Commitment

I was brought up to treat everyone with equal care and respect, irrespective of their situation in life or the colour of their skin. All my life I have followed that commitment and brought up my children to do the same. This commitment has a direct bearing on therapy, in my view: children deserve respect just as much as adults. It also helps to make the therapy fun. This is why I keep most of the toys in my clinic in clear plastic bags hanging from strings along one wall. And castle and a doll’s house, as much fun for boys as girls, are in prominent positions. There is a riddle in the design of the house which so far only one person has solved.

Childhood curiosity

Long before I learnt to read, I remember asking myself why my parents said DROING ROOM when there were no other words like DROING. It didn’t occur to me to ask my parents.

My parents would probably have told me that in the days of my grandmother (who had largely designed the house) it was the custom for men and women to separate after dinner. And one group would go to the drawing room or withdrawing room. My curiosity about DROING was probably my first thought about linguistics.

I was also very late learning to read. And I was told that I was very late in learning to talk intelligibly. Both of those things I can remember.

Possible words – therapy and a lost tradition

I qualified as a speech and language therapist in 1979, and went on to work mainly in community clinics as a speech and language therapist in the British National Health Service. I treated a broad range of issues, including language development, what are commonly regarded as articulatory issues, deep unintelligibility, but also disfluency and dysphonia.

I then started doing research which ended in 2002 as a PhD in linguistics at the University of Durham. I described some well-known patterns in the various incompetences in children’s speeech and language and some patterns which had not been described before. I asked: Why do inccompetences pattern the way they do? It is odd that they pattern at all. And I described the therapy which I had been developing since 1983. This was based on possible words, rather than actual words, making use of the patterns which occur naturally in children’s speech. Surprisingly, perhaps, a carefully structured sequence of possible words seemed to be therapeutic.

Research has shown that this idea of working with possible words was in fact an update of thinking which was seemingly first proposed in 1669. One aspect of my updating is with respect to word stress, as in the difference between cannon and canoe.

Being positive

By my approach, the first and most important thing is to listen very carefully to the child. Here parents can make a critical contribution. Speech and language are the most complex phenomena in biology. Yes, biology. So many of those working in this area often refer to it as ‘biolinguistics‘. And so the process of learning to talk has many aspects. But the process of learning the all important structures of speech and language. The learning process is itself highly structured. Otherwise there would be no realistic prospect of different people ever agreeing about what anything means.

So in my treatment, I mostly try to hide the fact that I am trying to help a child to say something which he or she has not said before. Some small children are well aware of the fact that they need help with their speech. But to my way of thinking there no advantage in making this more evident than it already is. So unless a child actually asks for explicit feedback (and some children do), I prefer just to congratulate them for whatever they say, no matter whether this is right or wrong. If they don’t say things quite right I proceed on the basis that I should have adjusted the task to make sure that the child’s effort was successful. Success is more motivating than failure. The learning is from the structuring of the tasks. (See Nunes, 2002, 2006, 2023).

Qualifications

I have a BA in sociology, an MA and a PhD in theoretical linguistics, and a diploma in speech and language therapy. For my PhD I investigated the relation between current linguistic theory and a broad range of incompetences, some minor, from normally developing children, some profound and complex, with the effect that the resulting speech was only comprehensible to those who knew the child well, if at all. This was in a framework broadly inspired by the work of Noam Chomsky. I successfully defended my thesis in 2002.

The how and why

Ever since I went to university and after some more training became  a speech and language therapist, I have been fascinated by the intersections between sociology, psychology, biology, and linguistics.

Noam Chomsky and others talk about ‘the logical problem of language acquisition’. But there is also an emerging question about how speech and language evolved in the human species – what Chomsky now calls ‘evolvability’.

The reason I make the theoretical choices I do is that there seems to be a close connection between the issue of evolvability and problems of speech and language development in children. Developing the two main themes of my PhD, I make the case for this as a proposal, keeping the primitives as simple and parsimonious as possible, in line with standard scientific practise in all fields.