ABSTRACT
Speech-language pathologists are professionals licensed and able to diagnose and treat patients from birth to later years through a wide variety of methods and techniques in an effort to help affect and ameliorate their clients’ life conditions if these clients are living with speech/neurological disorders/conditions or have received diagnoses that include among others the following: traumatic brain injury, autism, aphasia, stuttering, developmental language disorders, and phonological disorders. While linguists and applied linguists, of course, do not clinically treat individuals living with these disorders and conditions, the linguistic knowledge they possess may serve as important background information and may be a crucial part of the education of speech pathologists/therapists. The work environment of speech therapists is varied. Professionals can be found, for example, in schools, where their job focuses on academic success, from preschool to high school, in all public, private, and charter educational institutions.
