Tools

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. working over the period from the 1660s to the late 1900s before the term, speech and language therapy 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.

Tools and techniques follow directly from the scholarship, though not in the form of bells and whistles.

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 now 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.