In a working life from 1849 to 1905, Alexander Melville Bell developed what he called ‘visible speech’. This was a first version of what we now call phonetics. Bell was building on a long tradition going back to the 1669 work of William Holder of breaking the speech sounds down into their constituents. For example, vowels sound different to one another partly by the position of the tongue in the mouth and partly (by Bell’s discovery) by the rounding of the lips. Bell drew a V-shaped chart with the vowel in tar at the bottom and the vowels in tea and two at the top corners, and other vowels at positions in between. The arm of the V with tea at the top represented vowels with the tongue towards the front of the mouth. The other arm with two at the top represented vowels with the tongue more to the back. He called these and all the positions in between ‘cardinal’ positions.

Then in 1917 Daniel Jones, Bell’s academic descendant at University College London, proposed what he called the ‘cardinal vowels’, arranging these on a quadrilateral, with two variants of the AH sound at the bottom and the vowels in tea and two at the top corners, but without mentioning Bell.

In 1913 it was clear to George Bernard Shaw, as an acute and perceptive observer and a propagandist for spelling reform, that Jones had edged Bell out of his place in the history of speech science. Shaw dramatized the relation between Bell and Jones in the characters of Colonel Pickering and Henry Higgins in ‘Pygmalion’, pointedly mentioning visible speech in the preface. Eliza, as the main character in the play, is clearly named after Bell’s wife, Eliza, who would seem to have been as feisty as Shaw’s character.

Quite separately there was a real-life attempt to recast a working class woman as an aristocrat which Shaw probably knew about. This was apparently a disaster for all of those involved.

Rapid Syllable Transition Treatment

In a way rather similar to Jones’s attempt to write Bell out of history, there is a claim by Tricia McCabe, Cate Madill, Pippa Evans, Laura Crocco, Elizabeth Murray, Kirrie Ballard, and others, from the University of Sydney, Australia, in a series of publications from 2008 and later that they have invented something which they call ‘Rapid Syllable Transition Treatment’, or ReST – on https://rest.sydney.edu.au. They give their Head of Department, Don Robin, the credit for inventing ReST. He is named as a contributor to two of the 68 publications listed

The ReST authors make six points.

1. ReST involves ‘intensive practice in producing multisyllabic pseudo-words’, arbitrarily selected as the immediate goals;
2. ReST is for Childhood Apraxia of Speech or CAS;
3. ReST is characterised in terms of ‘Principles of Motor Learning’;
4. The pseudo-words are defined exclusively in terms of phonemes;
5. Feedback is given trial-by-trial, in case of doubt, erring on the side of correction;
6. Feedback is couched in terms of a three-way opposition between phonemic accuracy, ‘transitioning’ or  ‘smoothness’ and metricality or  ‘beats’.

To my mind there are four mistakes here:

1. A. The ReST authors ignore the standard practice in research of making only one change to a previously published protocol and recognising any previous work. They thus ignore the work of Holder (1669), Thelwall (1812), Bell (1849), Trubetskoy (1939), Jakobson, Fant and Halle (1951), Chomsky and Halle (1968), Nunes (2002 & 2006). This literature developed with gradually increasing elaboration, on the basis of more and more data, that human speech is characterised by particular forms of rhythm or metricality, and that speech sounds have constituent parts, now widely known to adherents of various theories as ‘distinctive features’, and that the commonest of children’s speech errors involve these rather than ‘speech sounds’, as represented by phonetics, which, rather oddly, the ReST authors disdain to use. Because of their multiple changes of protocol, it is impossible to evaluate which of the ReST authors’ changes are beneficial, if any. But it seems to me that the net effect of their changes are negative. To my mind, a child should ideally not be discharged from therapy until his or her speech is ‘normal’ in the sense that parents, teachers. therapist, and possibly the child, no longer see anything to worry about it. The ReST authers seem to regard an improvement in a child’s speech as sufficient. They set themselves a low standard. They may see the fact that they are applying the pseudo-words idea to CAS as exonerating them from any requirement to disclose any prior publications. But this has the effect of concealing what may be disadvantageous changes to older protocols, such as mine.
2. The original, therapeutic logic of pseudo-words – by definition, possible words – goes back to the practice of Holder and Bell, both of whose work foreshadows the generative linguistics of Chomsky and Halle. The idea of therapy with polysyllabic pseudo-words is one of the main ideas in my 2002 thesis where I credit all of those predecessors I was able to find. Because of the shenanigans of Daniel Jones and his successors, I missed the work of Holder, Thelwall and Bell. I described this novel approach by pseudo words in numerous posts over a number of years on Phonological Therapy, an Australian listserve owned by Caroline Bowen, and in a 2006  article in Speech and Language Therapy in Practice. Mentioning neither features or metricality (although they make use of both), the ReST authors’ name for their therapy does not make sense. It is about more than syllables. The ReST authors reconstrue my protocol in a pre-generative framework. ReST does not bear on the notion of possible words. The pseudo words are just those which the therapist has decided to teach. The logic of using pseudo-words in therapy is thus greatly reduced.
3. The ReST authors don’t mention any of the common children’s errors which either don’t fit into their  three-way framework or are errors by more than one of their criteria – like banana as BANA, or animal as AMAL or, in older children, Jerusalem as JUSALEM;
4. The ReST authors insist on correcting every error, ‘feedback’ as they call it, thus ignoring what is going on in the mind of the child, discouraging any spontaneous internalisation by the child.

Not having published anything until 2008, the ReST authors’ claim of invention is at best only half true, if it is not entirely spurious.

But despite their own rather cavalier approach to transparency, the ReST authors do not hesitate to advise that “the closer you stay to the research protocol, the more likely the children you treat will benefit from ReST therapy.” Not a hint of self-irony.

The price

There is a presumption in favour of openness in science. It is obviously important to develop new idea, to bring to light any errors and illogicalities in old thinking, and to take account of all advances in knowledge, technique and technology. But it is also important not to lose sight of old thinking. It is always possible that this has been just misunderstood. Or old errors can be just repeated over and over again, as has happened many times in the history of medicine and other sciences.

To my mind, the burial of Bell and his predecessors and the representation of ReST as a blue sky invention have had negative effects on the history and development of speech and language therapy and pathology in the English-speaking world.