[Speech therapy intervention in phonological disorders from the psycholinguistic paradigm of speech processing]

Abstract

The aim of this study is to present a survey of speech therapy intervention in phonological disorders (PD). We will examine the concepts of normal phonological development and those involved in PD in order to understand how they have been dealt with, historically, in speech therapy intervention. Lastly, we will describe how evaluation and intervention are carried out from the speech processing paradigm. Phonetic phonological skills allow people to decode the phonic strings they hear so as to be able to gain access to their phonological form and meaning. These abilities also enable them to encode these strings from lexical representations to pronounce words. The greater part of their development takes place during approximately the first four years of life. Speech processing difficulties affect the phonetic phonological skills and occur throughout almost all language pathologies, although the effect they exert is not always the same. This can range from a lack of the capacity to speak to important problems of intelligibility or mild problems with certain phonemes. Their influence on learning to read and write has been shown in recent decades. Speech therapy intervention began from a model based on articulatory phonetics. In the 70s a linguistic model based on the process of speech simplification and phonological analysis was added and this gave rise to a marked improvement in the systems used for evaluation and intervention. At present we have assumed a psycholinguistic model that links the perceptive skills with productive ones and top-down or bottom-up processing (from lexical representations to perception or production of phonemes and vice-versa).