Speech Pathology Essay

Brown’s Development and Speech Pathology

Ever since I was little, I have always dreamed about being a speech pathologist. I went to one in my early childhood, and I was obsessed with the idea of helping children with their speech impediments. I know without Mrs. Black my speech would probably still be incomprehensible. I’ve learned so much in my speech pathology classes, and I noticed something when I first looked at our linguistic readings. When looking at the chapters for linguistics I noticed it included syntax and morphology, these are two huge factors in speech pathology. As stated in LSOE chapter 6 morphology is the study of morphemes, and morphemes are the smallest unit of language that bare meaning. And also in chapter 7 it states that

Children with motor speech control or more likely to have trouble with morphemes, like /s/ or /z/, making it so they do not use plural forms. Another thing found in motor speech disorders is disorganized or omitted words in sentences, or sentences being simplified because they have difficulty with speech production. All of these problems with morphology and syntax can be easily fixed with the help of a speech pathologist.

One major tool that basically all speech pathologist use is Brown’s stages of syntactic and morphological development. “Browns stages of development was developed by Roger Brown, the stages help determine what path the normal expressive language development in English, in terms of morphology and syntax.(1984 Brown & Brooks)” To find the stage at which the child is at the speech pathologist must have the child say utterances. To find an accurate stage the pathologist will want to take down at least 100 utterances, if they don’t do a large number of utterances, than the accuracy could be greatly thrown off. Mann, Shankweiler, and Smith stated speech pathologist will take the utterances and count the morphemes using Brown’s stages 14