The Role of Linguistics in Language Disorders

This seminar will consider the role of linguistics in understanding, diagnosing and treating speech and language disorders, with a specific focus (in the context of the English language) on developmental and acquired aphasia, and dyslexia. The seminar will begin by reviewing the neuroanatomy of language. The focus on aphasia will include consideration of difficulties with lexical, syntactic and semantic processing. The focus on dyslexia will consider difficulties with writing, which is associated with phoneme to grapheme disassociation, difficulties with reading, which is associated with grapheme to phoneme disassociation, and spelling and reading and writing difficulties in general. General communicative and pragmatic patterns of people with aphasia and dyslexia will also be considered, as well as associated difficulties in first and second language acquisition. The role of linguistics will be further elaborated through the examination of the linguistic rationales used by the designers of diagnosing systems for both dyslexia and aphasia.

Further course reading will be discussed in the first session.

Further course requirements will be discussed in the first session.