ABSTRACT
In recent times, phonologists who are interested in psycholinguistics have turned from focusing purely on descriptively satisfying accounts of speech data, to concentrate more on what we may call psycholinguistically valid accounts. In other words, they have looked for theoretical models that might account for how speakers organize the phonology of their language internally, in the brain. This chapter introduces some of the basic notions of phonological theory. It examines the scene for the description of the development of phonological theory over the last 50 years or so, and the application of these developments to the analysis and remediation of disordered speech. Phonologists are interested in patterns of speech sounds. For example, they look at which sounds in any given language could be considered as groups of variants of a basic sound type; they examine the inventories of consonants and vowels of a language and compare these with those of other languages, or across dialects of a single language.
