Functional Articulation Disorders: Preliminaries to Treatment

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses functional articulation disorders. An ideal definition of articulation disorder would be operational and would reflect the psychological reality of the problem as it influences the speaker and as it is perceived by listeners. It would reflect scientific knowledge about matters such as articulatory movements including coarticulation and the physiological mechanisms that support them. It would encompass phonological development and patterns. Speech pathologists concerned with treatment of disordered articulation may be troubled by expanding knowledge that is cumbersome to learn. Where clinicians once learned procedures for delivery to patients, they now must also understand those services relative to scientific knowledge concerning speech production, speech perception, linguistics, learning, scientific standards of evidence, and many other issues. Speech pathology has tended to accept authority as a source of clinical knowledge—the more remote the authority from the study of speech disorders, the greater its prestige.