Established in 1991, the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association stands as the unofficial governing body of the field.
They conduct research with the aims of improving the assessment, treatment, and analysis of disordered speech and language, and offering insights to formal linguistic theories.
Although Jakobson's book only gained influence in the Anglophone world following the publication of the translated version Child language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals in 1968 [5] its impact was felt in the United States [6] and the United Kingdom,[7] among others, where changes of approach were adopted for phonological, grammar, semantic and other areas of language impairment.
His observation that deviant sound patterns obeyed similar rules to those of regular language systems remains a guiding principle in clinical linguistics even today.
[2] Most notably, the same approach was also adopted by Crystal and his colleagues in their development of a set of language ‘profiling’ procedures.
Syntax is the set of rules, principles and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, usually including word order.
However, with the influx of new insights from disciplines such as genetics, cognitive neuroscience and neurobiology (among others), it is no longer sufficient to just focus on the linguistic characteristics of a particular speech impairment.
[2] In today's context, one of the challenges in clinical linguistics includes identifying methods to bridge the knowledge of different fields to build a more holistic understanding.
The translation of general research that has been done into effective tools for clinical practice is another aspect that requires future work.