How and why linguistics matters

The fastest results are by what happens in the child’s mind

For your child

Clinical linguistics

Three questions

Being special

Keeping a diary of your child learning to talk

Linguistic facts

What is the best way of looking at them?

One human language

A uniqueness

The awesome foursome

Taking cues from children

Insights

Four clever letters

A lost insight from antiquity

Sounds and bits of sounds

The airstream and other details

An inventory of sounds

The phonemes

The Sound Pattern of English

From features to phonemes

Possible structures

Sounds, syllables, words

The clinic

A problem saying S and Z

Sometimes known as ‘lisping’

Co-morbidities

The co-occurrence of dyslexia, metalinguistic defects, and speech and language disorders

‘Childhood Apraxia of Speech’

A poverty of definition

Patterns in ‘processes’

Some things that go wrong

Goalposts

The first language?

The experience of success

Guiding the growth of understanding

Literacy

Learning to read and write

Unpicking history

The tragedy of English spelling

Root and branch reform or adaptation?

Evolution

What makes us human

One biological architecture

Glue

Putting contrasts together

Doing things with words

Making things fit

Phase

Two advantages of Phase in speech

Questions

Some shenanigans?

The myth of Pygmalion

A question about autism

Missing a step or a mis-step?