Speech and language therapy gets its tools from a wide variety of fields. The first and last of these fields is linguistics.

Three of the pioneers were the Reverend William Holder, John Thelwall, and Alexander Melville Bell. The last is from 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.

It is important to recognise that Chomsky’s tradition of linguistics started long BEFORE the structuralist tradition represented by William Croft (2002, 2004, 2010), Ben Ambridge (2004, 2010) and others which often seek to represent Chomsky’s tradition as some sort of interloper. Over the past 300 years, the history is the other way round.

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