Those working on the description of disordered speech are bound to be also involved with clinical phonology to some extent. This is because interpreting the speech signal is only the first step to an analysis. Describing the organization and function of a speech system is the next step. However, it is here that phonologists differ in their descriptions, as there are many current approaches in modern linguistics to undertaking phonological analyses of both normal and disordered speech.

Much of the work in theoretical phonology of the last fifty years or so is of little use in either describing disordered speech or explaining it. This is because the dominant theoretical approach in linguists as a whole attempts elegant descriptions of linguistic data, not a psycholinguistic model of what speakers do when they speak. The latter is what is needed in clinical phonology. In this text, Martin J. Ball addresses these issues in an investigation of what principles should underlie a clinical phonology. This is not, however, simply another manual on how to do phonological analyses of disordered speech data, though examples of the application of various models of phonology to such data are provided. Nor is this a guide on how to do therapy, though a chapter on applications is included. Rather, this is an exploration of what theoretical underpinnings are best suited to describing, classifying, and treating the wide range of developmental and acquired speech disorders encountered in the speech-language pathology clinic.

This book brings together twelve previously unpublished language profiles based on the original Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure (LARSP). The languages featured are: Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Finnish, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Malay and Swedish. Each chapter includes a grammatical sketch of the language, details of typical language development in speakers of the language, as well as a description of and justification for the profile itself. The book will be an invaluable resource for speech-language pathologists and others wishing to analyse the grammatical abilities of individuals speaking one of these languages. This new collection complements a previous book in this series on the same theme: Assessing Grammar: The Languages of LARSP (Ball et al., 2012,).

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We examine the distinction between “consonantal-r” and “vocalic-r” in American English, terms encountered in the speech pathology literature but rarely in phonetic studies. We review evidence from phonetics, phonology and therapy, and describe our own study which measured percentage rhoticity in pre- and post-vocalic /r/. We suggest that the evidence supports a view that there is no more variation between pre-vocalic and post-vocalic /r/ than found in many other consonants. We also evaluate the different transcription traditions for post-vocalic /r/ in American English (as a consonant or a vowel), and describe a preliminary study demonstrating that these transcriptions are not equivalent, and denote different realisations.