Phonological assessment, evaluation and explanation of speech disorders in children

Phonological assessment of speech disorders in children is now rapidly becoming a standard clinical procedure. This paper outlines one particular set of procedures- Phonological Assessment of Child Speech (PACS) -and illustrates their applications with an example of a child with a developmental phonological disorder. The current debate on the explanatory status of clinical phonological descriptions is reviewed and the issues raised in this debate are discussed. It is argued that clinical evaluations and explanations involve an intermeshing of the clinical linguistic description of the data of the disorder with the speech pathological description of the processes whereby the speech data were produced. Different approaches to clinical phonological descriptions and explanations are reviewed and illustrated with reference to five children with different types of speech disorder. The phonological procedures employed are: PACS Contrastive Assessment, PACS Phonological Process Analysis, and Elbert and Gierut's (1986) Assessment of Phonological Knowledge. An explanatory clinical evaluation combining phonological and speech pathological information is also provided. This tutorial review thus presents the current views on the applications of clinical phonology to the understanding of children's speech disorders.