ABSTRACT
Psycholinguistic theories have had a number of important insights for speech– language pathologists. Models of speech production and perception have added to the ways in which researchers and clinicians can conceptualize, analyze, and treat a multitude of speech and language disorders. Linguistic models rationalized using psychological or cognitive principles, often based on experimental findings, are appealing because they offer the potential for both explanatory as well as descriptive adequacy (Stackhouse & Wells, 1997). On the other hand, the application of theoretical ideas from strictly descriptive linguistic theories has not always been able to claim such explanatory power. Rather, theories from generative approaches to syntax or phonology, for example, have often provided new and interesting ways to visualize and label clinical data, but any explanation is often heavily couched in theory internal principles.
