Introductory Linguistics for Speech and Language Therapy Practice

Jan McAllister, James E. Miller

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118571941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Salud pública, administración y atención

This practical introduction to linguistics is a must-have resource for all speech and language therapy students, providing you with the fundamental theory needed as a foundation for practice.

Written by authors with extensive experience in both research and teaching, Introductory Linguistics for Speech and Language Practice equips you with a practical understanding of relevant linguistic concepts in the key language areas of morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse and pragmatics. Each chapter opens by explaining why the information is of relevance to the speech language therapist, and this integrated approach is emphasised via reference to relevant clinical resources. Exercises throughout each chapter also allow you to test your understanding of key principles and apply this knowledge to other areas of your study.

This concise, readable guide is a core text for all undergraduate and postgraduate students of speech and language therapy, and is also ideal for qualified therapists wanting to enrich their understanding of the linguistic assessments they use in practice.

1

Introduction

This book is a practical introduction to the aspects of linguistics that generalist speech and language therapists (SLTs) need to understand in order to be able to use the published tools that are available for analysing clients' language abilities. Linguistics is the study of the organising principles of language. It is concerned with language in general, not with specific languages, although from a practical point of view we may wish to apply the principles to a particular language (here, English).

If you are reading this book you are probably interested in Speech and Language Therapy. Perhaps you are studying on a degree course leading to registration as an SLT – if so, one would certainly hope that you are interested in Speech and Language Therapy! Or perhaps you are considering enrolling on such a degree, or are a qualified SLT already but want to brush up on your language analysis skills. Whatever your interest, read on!

1.0 Why do speech and language therapy students need to study linguistics?

We said in the previous section that this book was about linguistics, but some students seem to wonder why, when they have enrolled on a degree in Speech and Language Therapy, they need to spend time studying linguistics, which is, after all, a separate academic discipline which can be studied to degree level in its own right. A short answer to this question is that professional bodies say that students need this knowledge. The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT), which is the professional body that provides leadership and sets professional standards for SLTs in the United Kingdom, produces curriculum guidelines that specify the knowledge bases that speech and language therapists must acquire before registration, and one academic discipline that they stipulate is general linguistics. This is in addition to the related subjects of phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, bilingualism and language development.

The RCSLT curriculum guidelines are drawing attention to the fact that linguistics is one of the key underpinning disciplines of Speech and Language Therapy, alongside subjects like anatomy and physiology, psychology and sociology. A newly qualified speech and language therapist who had not mastered these different disciplines to the required level would struggle to carry out their role.1 Understanding the structure and function of language systems is as fundamental to the job of an SLT as understanding the structure of the human body is to the job of a doctor. It would be strange, not to say worrying, to be treated by a doctor who did not know about the structure or function of the human body, and it would be just as strange and worrying to be treated by an SLT who did not know about the structure and function of language.

1.1 Why do speech and language therapy students need this book?

Learning linguistics in the context of a Speech and Language Therapy degree presents various challenges. Like most students entering higher education today, those studying Speech and Language Therapy typically arrive with little prior knowledge of linguistics or even basic grammar. Many ‘introductory’ texts assume that students already have an accurate understanding of, for example, part-of-speech labels, but for many, this is not the case. Also, though a practical understanding of linguistics is fundamental to Speech and Language Therapy practice, it competes for space in the curriculum with the other knowledge bases that students need to acquire during their degree (life sciences, clinical skills, etc.). Given that they must acquire quite sophisticated linguistic knowledge in a very limited time, students need to focus on just those aspects of linguistics that they will need to master in order to be able to carry out their clinical work, rather than equally interesting but less relevant topics that are covered in many introductory linguistics texts, such as language evolution, historical linguistics or non-human communication.

There are some texts that omit these peripheral subjects and just focus specifically on the core areas of linguistics. These are typically written for students on linguistics degree courses or people with an interest in linguistics per se, rather than as one of several disciplines underpinning their main focus of study. As such, they usually provide more detail than is strictly necessary for an introductory text for SLTs, often illustrating them with examples from a wide range of languages. This is not to say that the material covered in these texts is not interesting and important in its own right; this approach is appropriate where the aim is to provide a wide-ranging and in-depth understanding of the subject.

But the needs of students on Speech and Language Therapy courses are different. A comparison of core linguistics texts with assessments and other clinical resources that are routinely used by SLTs shows that the latter focus on only a subset of the structures and concepts covered in the former. Most of these resources also focus on the English language; whilst we acknowledge that many SLTs work in multicultural and multilinguistic settings, the one language that students on UK speech and language therapy courses absolutely must be able to describe is English. Given the limited amount of time that students of speech and language therapy have to devote to the linguistics strand of their degree, they need a text that will focus tightly on the core structures that are examined in the most commonly used clinical resources, and for students graduating in the United Kingdom, the language that they most need to know about is English.

1.2 Aims of this book, and what this book will not aim to do

The aim of the book will therefore be to provide the student with a practical introduction to those core linguistic concepts that are most often the subject of clinical resources and to illustrate these concepts with examples from English. As an introductory text with this applied aim, it will avoid reference to formal linguistic models and engagement with current controversies in the field of linguistics. By introducing the concepts and terminology of traditional linguistic description alongside those employed within speech and language therapy (where these differ), it will enable students to explore the subject in more detail using more advanced texts.

The book will focus on the core areas of (to use traditional linguistic terminology) morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse and pragmatics. It will not attempt to cover phonology, which is traditionally considered part of ‘speech’ rather than ‘language’ by SLTs.2 Similarly, we will not attempt to provide in-depth coverage of any psycholinguistic or sociolinguistic concepts, although we will refer to concepts from these fields where necessary to elucidate relevant material. It is beyond the scope of the book to analyse languages other than English, and such topics can be dealt with more effectively in more specialised texts.

The focus of this book is the techniques of core linguistics that are needed to carry out analysis of disordered language, rather than the products of such analysis. The latter is the province of clinical linguistics, and the interested reader is referred to the further reading list at the end of this chapter. This decision has motivated the choice of language data that we analyse in this book. For example, occasionally in exercises we have used picture materials to generate extended pieces of language for analysis. For the reasons just stated, we have deliberately not attempted to reproduce the kinds of disordered samples that SLT clients would be likely to produce in response to such materials. Instead, we have chosen to illustrate the concepts that we are trying to impart by using examples from non-disordered language, reasoning that this is appropriate for an introductory linguistics text. Once readers have acquired these concepts, they are in a position to understand texts that focus on disordered samples.

Many of the examples that we have used are modelled on those found in clinical resources. We have avoided directly quoting the resources themselves because of copyright restrictions. It should be borne in mind that the specific examples used in the clinical resources have been validated using normative data; our examples, though they imitate the structure of these resources, have not been normed in this way.

Linguistics is a huge subject area, and as we noted earlier, introductory texts cover a great deal that is not directly relevant to speech and language therapy. In choosing which topics to cover in this text, we have been guided by the concepts that are addressed in speech and language therapy resources. Where we judged it necessary, we have explored additional topics that are not directly addressed in clinical resources, to provide relevant background to those topics that are addressed, or to set them in a wider context.

We recognise that there is a great deal more to communication than we will aim to cover in this text. Particularly when language is disrupted, non-verbal means of communication such as gesture are potentially extremely important, both to the client, and from a professional point of view, to the SLT. But we are concerned here with language, not communication. Communication is a means of conveying meaning (social, emotional, transactional, informational, etc.) between individuals. Language is one form of communication, albeit a highly intricate form that is characterised by a large number of complex rules.

This book will not attempt to impart any clinical knowledge at all. In particular, it will not try to teach students how to administer, score or interpret specific assessments or use therapy materials. For this, students must use the guidance of their clinical educators and the manuals that are provided with clinical resources.

1.3 Some preliminaries

We will continue this chapter by noting a few fundamental assumptions that should be stated explicitly before we begin.

A first observation concerns the notion of ‘standard English’. Our main focus here is core linguistics, and we are using data modelled on the material that will be encountered in the widely available clinical resources that SLTs use. In these resources, target items are almost always framed in terms of a notional ‘standard English’ – the variety of English that is considered not to contain particular dialectal variants. It is obviously of great importance that students of Speech and Language Therapy should acquire theoretical concepts and practical knowledge and skills relevant to language variation, and indeed sociolinguistics, whose province these concepts are, is a curriculum requirement for Speech and Language Therapy courses. It is not, however, the topic of this book. The core linguistic concepts that we wish to elucidate here can perfectly well be illustrated using standard English, and that is what we will do. But readers should not conclude that this is the whole story.

Clinically, it is important to distinguish between the processing (mental operations) involved in receptive language (comprehension) and expressive language (production). Although students need to understand the psycholinguistic frameworks that differentiate these activities, the descriptive linguistic frameworks that are relevant are common to them both. Similarly, we are mainly focusing on aspects of language that are common to both the spoken and written forms.

We should also draw the distinction between competence, the body of abstract knowledge that a speaker has about the way that language works, and performance, the way that a piece of language is produced on a particular occasion, when it is subject to competing processing demands, limitation of resources such as working memory and so on. Our goal here is to provide a background to enable the reader to understand the model of competence that is encapsulated in the resources that SLTs use.

1.3.1 Levels of description in language

Having set out the scope of this book, we now turn to a preliminary discussion of the way that a subject as broad as language can be split into manageable components.

1.3.1.1 Three aspects of language

We suggested earlier that language, as one form of communication, was a means of conveying meaning. In fact, it is useful to distinguish at least three aspects of language of which meaning is just one. Let us start by cutting the linguistic cake three ways. We can think of language as involving meaning, form and function (alternatively, meaning, form and use).

Many words in English have more than one meaning. This ambiguity is the source of many children's jokes: Why wouldn't the elephant travel by train? – Because his trunk ...