Clinical Phonetics

Clinical phonetics is an application-oriented branch of the linguistic discipline of phonetics . It deals with the description of symptoms and diagnosis of speech, language and voice disorders in adults and disorders of language acquisition or language development in children.

Fields of activity

Clinical phonetics examines the planning and execution of speaking (articulation) as well as the perception of the speech signal (perception). When examining the disorders or diseases, one can distinguish experimental clinical phonetics from theoretical clinical phonetics. Experimental clinical phonetics deals with phonetic investigation methods in the area of speech disorders, while theoretical clinical phonetics tries to create a phonetically oriented model of language processing (theories on language production and perception). Clinical phonetics encompasses the following disciplines:

Breath, voice and speaking theory
Clinical Speech Science
Speech therapy
Patholinguistics - Clinical Linguistics - Neurolinguistics
Pathophonetics - Neurophonetics
Speech therapy and speech-impaired education

Diseases and disorders

Clinical phonetics examines, describes and treats the disorders and diseases listed below. Basically, three areas of interference can be distinguished, namely interference with the speaker, in the physical transmission path and those affecting the listener.

Disturbances in the speaker:

central disorder - brain function is impaired

z. B. Broca's aphasia , Wernicke aphasia , dysarthria

Disturbance of language development

peripheral production disorder (affects the speaking apparatus)

Sigmatism (faulty / s / -realization)

Resonance disorder - Rhinolalia (= nasal)

Disturbance of the ability to speak or the fluency of speech, e.g. B. stuttering , stammering

Voice disorder - disorder of voice formation, e.g. B. dysphonia such as hoarseness or vocal cord paralysis

myofunctional disorder - impaired muscle function

physical disturbance of the external feedback (auditory feedback)

peripheral perception disorder of external feedback (auditory feedback)

Disturbances in the physical transmission path:

Distortion of the acoustic speech signal

Disturbance with the listener:

peripheral perception disorder (hearing impairment)

central fault (see above)

Special questions in the case of hearing disorders, intellectual disabilities, etc.

aims

Clinical phonetics has the following goals:

The clarification of unexplored areas of clinical phonetics.
A description of the linguistic behavior of patients, their doctors and other people who interact with them.
The analysis of these descriptions with the aim of illustrating the systematic nature of the disorder involved.
The classification of patient behavior as part of the process of various diagnoses.
The evaluation of this behavior based on the approximation to a linguistic norm scale.
The formulation of hypotheses to improve this behavior (insofar as the therapy and management of the patient claim a reference to linguistic guidelines) and the assessment of the resulting results as treatment successes.
The assessment of the strategies that will be used insofar as linguistic benchmarks are involved.

Diagnostic procedures

The disorders or diseases are identified and interpreted using the IPA ( International Phonetic Alphabet ) or the extended IPA. The sounds produced by the patient are recorded and transcribed, and based on this, the diagnosis and therapy recommendations are made. Various examination methods are also used to diagnose, determine therapy goals and evaluate changes, for example:

There are also other methods for determining articulation, phonation, nasality, etc.

literature

Martin J. Ball, Martin Duckworth (eds.): Andvances in Clinical Phonetics (= Studies in Speech Pathology and Clinical Linguistics. Vol. 6). John Benjamin Publishing Company, Amsterdam et al. 1996, ISBN 90-272-4337-9 .
Martin J. Ball, Code Chris: Instrumental Clinical Phonetics. Whurr Publishers Ltd, London 1997, ISBN 1-89763-518-4 .
David Crystal : Clinical Linguistics (= Disorders of Human Communication. Vol. 3). Springer, Vienna et al. 1981, ISBN 3-211-81622-4 .
Lawrence D. Shriberg, Raymond D. Kent: Clinical Phonetics. 2nd edition. Allyn & Bacon, Boston MA 1995, ISBN 0-02-410213-X .
Wilhelm H. Vieregge: Patho-Symbolphonetik. Auditory description of pathological language (= journal for dialectology and linguistics. Vol. 100, book). Steiner, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-515-06807-4 .
Wolfram Ziegler, Karin Deger (Eds.): Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics. Whurr Publishers Ltd, London 1998, ISBN 1-86156-054-0 .

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