Research Methods in Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics

A Practical Guide

Nicole Müller, Martin J. Ball, Nicole Müller, Martin J. Ball

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781444335842, 9781444335835
• eBook ISBN: 9781118349670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Research Methods in Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics

GUIDES TO RESEARCH METHODS IN LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS

"Up to date and covering a refreshingly wide range of approaches, this is a first-rate guide and resource for both practitioners and consumers of research in clinical linguistics and phonetics."
Mick Perkins, University of Sheffield

"This truly outstanding collection of readings, treating a number of critical issues with great clarity, is certain to be quickly recognized as a valuable resource by the community of researchers."
Martin R. Gitterman, The City University of New York

Research Methods in Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics introduces a wide range of research philosophies, methods, and tools used across linguistics, phonetics, and speech science, as applied to disordered speech and language. Comprised of sixteen chapters, each authored by specialists representing a variety of approaches, the volume addresses core topics for students `undertaking their own research, including:

• experimental and quasi-experimental methods
• qualitative methods, including ethnography and conversation analysis
• sociolinguistics
• corpus construction and analysis
• data recording, transcription, and digital analysis of speech

In addition to exploring these and other topics, the volume considers the research ethics associated with working with those who have speech or other communication difficulties. There is a detailed discussion of the dissemination of research results in the form of theses, dissertations, and journal articles, and of the peer review process. Chapters include summary boxes to highlight salient information, and resources for researchers such as relevant web archives and tools. It offers students and researchers from a variety of entry points – such as linguistics, education, psychology, and speech pathology – an introduction to the scope of research in clinical linguistics and phonetics, and a practical guide to this interdisciplinary field.

1
Linguistics, Phonetics, and Speech-Language Pathology: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics

Nicole Müller and Martin J. Ball

1.1 A Brief Historical Overview of Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics

The speech-language sciences and arts have, of course, informed speech-language pathology for a long time; for example, the knowledge of normal articulation was imported from phonetics, the use of terms for word classes (such as nouns and verbs) from traditional grammar. However, the more recent close interaction between ­linguistics and communication disorders started only in the 1970s. Kent (2011), in a review of the development of the journal Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, points to Duchan’s online survey of the development of speech-language pathology, where she refers to the period from 1965 to 1975 as the “linguistic era” (see Duchan, 2011).

In the 1970s and 1980s David Crystal and his colleagues developed linguisti­cally based profiling techniques for the analysis of normal and disordered syntax and morphology (Crystal, 1979; Crystal, Fletcher, and Garman, 1976), and then phonology, prosody, and semantics (Crystal, 1982). At the same time an interest in the clinical application of modern phonological theory began to emerge, with publications by Grunwell (1982), Ingram (1976, 1981), Edwards and Shriberg (1983), and Elbert and Gierut (1986), among others. Interestingly, however, the appearance of the term “clinical linguistics” dates to the end of this period, with the publication of the book of that title by David Crystal (1981). Crystal defines clinical linguistics as “the ­application of linguistic science to the study of communication disability, as ­encountered in clinical situations” (Crystal, 1981: 1). He added to this definition: “clinical ­linguistics is the application of the theories, methods and findings of ­linguistics (­including phonetics) to the study of those situations where language handicaps are diagnosed and treated” (Crystal, 1984: 31). Limiting the direction of application from linguistics to language disorder is intentional: “the orientation … should be noted. It may be contrasted with the approach of neurolinguists, for example, who study clinical language data in order to gain insights into linguistic or neurological theory” (Crystal, 1984: 30–31). Nevertheless, despite Crystal’s wish for clinical linguistics to be a unidirectional hybrid discipline, many researchers working in the field have adopted a bidirectional approach. For example, Ball and Kent (1987: 2) wrote that they preferred a definition that allows “either applying linguistic/phonetic analytic techniques to clinical problems, or showing how clinical data contribute to theoretical issues in linguistics/phonetics.” The work of Grodzinsky and colleagues (e.g. Grodzinsky, 1986, 1990) illustrates the use of data from language disorder to inform syntactic theory.

Clinical linguistics developed through the publication of a number of important books (some noted above), the drawing up of analysis procedures and the development of instrumental techniques (to which we return below). An important milestone for this new field of study was the launching of a new academic journal, Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics. This took place in 1987, with an initial volume of just two issues (soon increased to four). Now in its twenty-fifth year, the journal publishes 12 issues a year, testimony to the increase in interest and work in clinical linguistics.

1.2 The Role of Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics in Speech-Language Pathology

In this section we will look at some of the contributions made from clinical ­linguistics and phonetics to clinical practice and research in speech-language pathology, ­starting with the investigation of speech output impairments as informed by clinical phonetics. The description of disordered speech has benefitted in several ways from the input of clinical phonetics, not least in phonetic transcription, which forms the ­foundation on which much of both clinical decision-making and clinical speech research builds. Phonetic transcription using the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) has long been the norm in data analysis in disordered speech. However, it became clear fairly early on that the range of sounds encountered in the clinic appeared to be larger than the range encountered in natural language. At first ad hoc symbolizations were devised by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to deal with sounds that could not be denoted through the use of IPA symbols or diacritics because they did not occur in natural language (Grunwell, 1982). In 1983 the King’s Fund in the UK published a paper describing a proposed range of additional symbols for just these atypical sounds: the Phonetic Representation of Disordered Speech (PRDS; PRDS, 1983). While a step forward, these PRDS symbols had limited currency, being little known, for example, in North America. The 1989 meeting of the International Phonetic Association in Kiel instituted a committee to examine the symbolization of atypical sounds found in disordered speech. It considered the PRDS symbols and other suggestions and eventually recommended a set of Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet (extIPA) for clinical use. This was described in Duckworth et al. (1990), and has been updated since (see, e.g. Ball, Müller, and Rutter (2010) for the most recent (2008) revision).

The provision of the extIPA symbols set (and later on the VoQS voice quality ­symbols; see Ball, Esling, and Dickson, 2000; Ball and Müller, 2005) is a good ­example of how insights from phonetics have influenced developments in communication disorders. However, it is also arguable that the needs of speech pathology (in this case the description, through transcription, of atypical speech) have informed ­phonetics. While it is true that Pike (1943) contained descriptions of a wide range of sounds (both linguistic and nonlinguistic), it is only since the development of extIPA that phoneticians seem to have recognized this range of sounds not found in natural language (for example, through the inclusion of the extIPA symbols in publications of the International Phonetic Association).

Another example of a two-way interaction between speech science and speech pathology can be found with instrumental analyses of speech. A wide range of these exist (see, e.g. Awan, 2008; Ball and Code, 1997; Gibbon, 2008; Kent and Kim, 2008; Whitehill and Lee, 2008; and Chapters 4, 12, and 13 in this volume). Some of these techniques examine speech production processes, some the acoustic signal, and others the perception of speech. While these techniques were mainly developed for the investigation of normal speech, some of them were given a special impetus through their use in the speech clinic. We can point to two of these in particular: electropalatography (EPG) and electroglottography (EGG) (also known as electrolaryngography, ELG). The work by Gibbon and colleagues on “covert contrasts” using EPG is a good illustration of this clinic–research interaction. Gibbon investigated articulatory contrasts made by a speaker that are not perceptible by the listener. For example, in Gibbon (1990) the author reports that one of two sisters is transcribed as backing alveolars to velars, but the other is not. EPG patterns recorded for both sisters had tongue contacts at both alveolar and velar positions at the onset of target alveolars, but the EPG tongue–palate contact patterns at the point of release differed. One sister released her velar contacts before her alveolar ones (thereby ­producing a release burst that was acoustically similar to that of the control subject), whereas the other released her alveolar contacts first and velar ones last, thereby producing a release burst that sounded like that of [g].

As Fourcin (2000) has pointed out, ELG (or EGG) can help establish links between objective measurement using laryngograph-type signals and the use of subjective auditory dimensions of voice quality description. This is because ELG measurement techniques are able to provide a way of escaping from the current clinical bias towards the utilization of data that are convenient for the researchers, because they are easy to measure (sustained vowels for example), but that are rather less relevant to real-life voice use.

Clinical linguistic research has also informed development of the application of phonology to disordered speech. As Bowen (2009) notes, insights from early phonological theory began to be applied clinically in the 1960s. Many researchers working within clinical linguistic tradition helped spread later theoretical developments within phonology to clinical situations. For example, Grunwell used Stampe’s framework of natural phonology in clinical assessment (Grunwell, 1987, 1997; Stampe, 1979).

Bernhardt and Stemberger, and Gierut and Dinnsen applied nonlinear models of phonology, and more recently Optimality Theory, to disordered speech data (Bernhardt and Gilbert, 1992; Bernhardt and Stemberger, 2000; Dinnsen, 1997; Dinnsen and Gierut, 2008), and the current authors have used more functional and cognitive ^­models of phonology for the analysis of clinical data (Ball, Rutter, and Code, 2008; Müller, Ball, and Rutter, 2008). Ball, Müller, and Rutter (2010) describe a range of phonological approaches and how these can be used to analyze ­disordered-speech data and also to help plan intervention.

Concrete outcomes from clinical phonology include a range of assessment instruments based on different models of phonology, or combining several such approaches. Arguably, the two such assessments most within the clinical phonology tradition are the PACS procedure (Grunwell, 1985) and PROPH, a profile developed by David Crystal (Crystal, 1982) (see Ball and Müller, 1997, for a comparison of the two ­profiles). Both these assessments rely on naturalistic speech data and provide profiles of the speaker’s phonological abilities, using a range of phonological analyses, rather than standardized scores derived from a limited set of tokens.

1.3 Research Philosophies, and the Rest of this Book

Clinical linguistics and phonetics is far from a homogenous field in terms of research traditions, philosophies, and methods adopted by its practitioners. In fact one might go so far as to say that the one thing all clinical linguists and phoneticians have in common is an interest in data related to language or speech disorder, which in turn represents a rather wide remit, and not one that is entirely straightforward in definition (for instance, do we describe the communicative sequelae of dementia as primarily cognitive or linguistic, and indeed, wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Linguistics, Phonetics, and Speech-Language Pathology: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics
• 2 Research Ethics
• 3 Experimental and Quasi-experimental Research in Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics
• 4 The Investigation of Speech Production: Experimental and Quasi-experimental Approaches
• 5 Investigating Disordered Language: Experimental and Quasi-experimental Approaches
• 6 Qualitative Research in Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics
• 7 An Ethnographic Approach to Assessing Communication Success in Interactions Involving Adults with Developmental Delay
• 8 Conversation Analysis Applied to Disordered Speech and Language
• 9 Clinical Sociolinguistics
• 10 The Recording of Audio and Video Data
• 11 Data Processing: Transcriptional and Impressionistic Methods
• 12 Data Processing: Digital Analysis of Speech Audio Signals
• 13 Data Processing: Imaging of Speech Data
• 14 Data Analysis and Interpretation: Statistical Methods
• 15 AphasiaBank: Data and Methods
• 16 Disseminating Research: Reading, Writing, and Publishing
• Index
• End User License Agreement