Clinical linguistics

Clinical Linguistics is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics involved in the description, analysis, and treatment of language disabilities, especially the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology. The study of the linguistic aspect of communication disorders is of relevance to a broader understanding of language and linguistic theory. Clinical Linguistics is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics involved in the description, analysis, and treatment of language disabilities, especially the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology. The study of the linguistic aspect of communication disorders is of relevance to a broader understanding of language and linguistic theory. The International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association is the unofficial organization of the field and was formed in 1991. The Journal of Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics is the major research journal of the field and was founded by Martin J. Ball. Practitioners of clinical linguistics typically work in Speech-Language Pathology departments or linguistics departments. They conduct research with the aims of (i) improving the assessment, treatment, and analysis of disordered speech/language, and (ii) offering insights to formal linguistic theories. While the majority of clinical linguistics journals still focus only on English linguistics, there is an emerging movement toward comparative clinical linguistics across multiple languages. The study of communication disorders has a history that can be traced all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Modern clinical linguistics, however, largely has its roots in the twentieth century, with the term ‘clinical linguistics’ gaining wider currency in the 1970s, with it being used as the title of a book by prominent linguist David Crystal in 1981. Widely credited as the ‘father of clinical linguistics’, Crystal's book Clinical Linguistics went on to become one of the most influential books of the field, as this new discipline was mapped out in great detail. The application of linguistic science to the analysis of speech and language disorders has always been necessary but understudied. Roman Jakobson, a Russian structural linguist, was one of the first to try to apply linguistic theory to the study of Speech-Language Pathology. Published in 1941, his book Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze recorded the results of his analysis of language use in child language acquisition and in adults with acquired aphasia. Although Jakobson's book only gained influence in the Anglophone world following the publication of the translated version Child language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals in 1968 its impact was felt in the United States and the United Kingdom, among others, where changes of approach were adopted for phonological, grammar, semantic and other areas of language impairment. His observation that deviant sound patterns obeyed similar rules to those of regular language systems remains a guiding principle in clinical linguistics even today. Most notably, the same approach was also adopted by Crystal and his colleagues in their development of a set of language ‘profiling’ procedures.