Page 66 - The Modul of Psycholinguistics Studies_2

However, the medical approach has major limitations as a
basis for the principled remediation of speech problems in

individual children. A medical diagnosis cannot always be made.
More often the term ''specific speech and/or language

impairment'' is used once all other possible medical labels have
been ruled out. Moreover, even if a neuroanatomical correlate or
genetic basis for a speech and language impairment can be

identified, the medical diagnosis does not predict with any
precision the speech and language difficulties that an individual
child will experience, so the diagnosis will not significantly affect

the details of a day-to-day intervention program. To plan
appropriate therapy, the medical model needs to be

supplemented by a linguistic approach.
The linguistic perspective is primarily concerned with the
description of language behavior at different levels of analysis. If

a child is said to have a phonetic or articulator difficulty, the
implication is that the child has problems with the production of

speech sounds. A phonological difficulty refers to inability to use
sounds contrastively to convey meaning. For example, a child
may use [t] for [s] at the beginning of words, even though the

child can produce a [s] sound in isolation perfectly well. Thus,
the child fails to distinguish between target words (e.g., "sea"

versus "tea") and is likely to be misunderstood by the listener.
The cause of this difficulty may not be obvious.
The linguistic sciences have provided an indispensable

foundation for the assessment of speech and language difficulties
(Ingram, 1976; Grunwell, 1987). However, this assessment is still

a description and not an explanation of the disorder. Specifically,
a linguistic analysis focuses on the child's speech output but does
66 | Fatma Yuniarti, M.Pd., B.I