About Doctor Aubrey Nunes

Profession

I am a Speech and Language Therapist, registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (Registration SL042869). I am a member of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (Registration number RC0006495). When I was doing my first degree (in sociology) it occurred to me that the process of learning to talk was vulnerable, and I did a course in psycholinguistics as part of that degree. Clearly the acquisition process can fail to some degree. 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. My PhD research was on the clinical utility of modern linguistic research in the area, known of phonology, of putting words together correctly and comprehensibly. The results of that research seem to speed things up in therapy. That was what my examiners said. Part of that research (not the clinical part) now needs to be corrected. I now study the issues from my 2002 PhD in a more general way, in the area known as syntax, of putting words together to form sentences. 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. – such as syntax and phonology and in the area known as metalinguistics, understanding that there is such a thing as a correctly spoken word or fully formed sentence. More technically the whole range of these issues fall within what is known as the ‘learnability space‘ and the area known as ‘ clinical linguistics‘, at least on my definition of the field. I also write. My current research is summarised here. (See References for the literature I refer to. This is a brief conspectus of a truly enormous literature).

Worries about speech and language delays

My mother used to tell me that my speech and language were very delayed. I can remember her saying once when I was about nine, “Oh, do stop mumbling!” I had no idea what she was talking about.  Then one of my children had only one word when he was three. One of his friends was asking if he was ‘mentally handicapped’. I was worried. I did not know anything about research. My child’s problems very gradually resolved. He actually had very little in the way of direct help. It now seems likely that there is a genetic connection between our two cases. As soon as I pointed this out to my mother, the family history changed. But my worries about my child many years ago were part of what led me to linguistics and the study of how children learn speech and language, why this is actually quite mysterious, and how there can be long term consequences of deep and severe delay, even if this seems to resolve.

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, saying a carefully-structured sequence of possible words was clearly therapeutic.

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).

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 two years 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 I believe there is a close, necessary 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.

This website

This website is for parents with the worries that I once had.

Contact Doctor Aubrey Nunes