dev. psycholinguistics in SLP

[Carol Anne Miller]

My degree is in psychology.  I did a post-doc and was a research associate 
with Larry Leonard in Audiology & Speech Sciences at Purdue.  I'm currently 
a faculty member in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Penn State.  My 
department does appreciate the value of contributions from other 
disciplines...of 11 tenure track faculty, 3 of us don't have CSD degrees 
and backgrounds.  There are 2 psychologists and 1 special ed person.

I strongly believe that CSD needs developmental psycholinguistics and 
related disciplines.  I also believe, as has already been mentioned, that 
developmental psycholinguistics needs CSD.  While many psychologists, 
linguists, developmentalists, etc.  have a fantastic understanding of 
language and communication disorders, there are also many who have a rather 
simplistic view, if they even think about language disorders at all.  My 
experiences with children with language impairment have fundamentally 
changed the way I think about language.

No, I don't think that the
>depth of what we have learned dev psychling is
>actually being transmitted to future speech-language pathologists?
but I doubt that the depth of what we have learned in voice, or fluency, or 
neuroscience, or anything is really being taught, because a master's degree 
program is too short.  I would love to see our curriculum include more on 
child language (and I don't think I'm alone), but what's going to give to 
make room for it?  It's pretty much a zero-sum game, or that's how it seems 
to me.

I think better education = interdisciplinary education.  I don't know how 
to make it happen, though.

Carol





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Carol Miller, Ph.D.
Dept. of Communication Sciences & Disorders
Penn State University
115-B Moore Building
(814) 865-6213
cam47 at psu.edu
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