degrees in Rehab Sciences

[Dale, Philip S.]

I like to think of myself as a double imposter here. Nominally, I'm a psychologist chairing a department of communication science and disorders. But I'm not really a psychologist, either, except possibly a self-taught one. My own PhD was from a now-extinct program at the University of Michigan called "Communication Sciences." It was primarily electrical engineering and computer science, with a sprinkling of cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, and speech science. It was an early attempt to create an integrated science of cognition, with information theory as the key metaphor.

Like others who have contributd to this thread, I agree that necessity - the shortage of PhD faculty in speech-language pathology/communication disorders - has had the effect of moving in many people from neighboring fields. And in fact, there has always been a substantial minority of people in SLP/CD who have favored this on purely academic grounds, for all the obvious reasons. I think almost of all of us "immigrants" have been welcomed warmly.

With respect to Matt's question:

2. For those of you who responded positively to the first question:
Do you believe that depth of what we have learned dev psychling is
actually being transmitted to future speech-language pathologists?  If
you think the answer to this query is negative, do you think we have
the moral / professional responsibility of trying to change this
situation?

The easy answer, and one with much truth to it, is that the SLP/CD curriculum needs more psychology and more linguistics, that some re-balancing is needed. On the other hand, having spent as much time as I have around clinicians, and children and adults with needs for clinical services, not to mention being married to an articulate SLP, I think I've learned enough to be cautious about assuming that neighboring fields can solve one's own problems. Accurate characterizations of adult language competence and performance, and accurate accounts of developmental phenomena and processes, will be crucial for helping individuals with communication needs. But they aren't going to anywhere near the whole story. How problems arise, what organismic and environmental factors mitigate or exacerbate them, how to diagnose them, and indeed how to treat them don't follow automatically from what psychologists and linguists can tell us. Nowhere is this more evident than in the myriad of published articles about some process of functioning or development that have an obligatory "clinical implications" added at the end, which generally doesn't add anything. What psychology in particular has to offer SLP/CD is not just content, but the culture of research, and research techniques. The move to evidence-based practice is a good start, but skepticism and ecologically valid research are needed on many other issues as well. Linguistics offers powerful insight and generalizations about language structure, but SLP/CD research is needed to know which theories, for example, posit units which are functional for communication disorders and the treatment thereof. I suppose this all adds up to an academic version of "Think globally, act locally."

Philip Dale