Clinical Linguistics: a barely known interdisciplinary relationship?

Abstract

Introduction: Each day, the development of science needs more from interdisciplinarity, provided that it allows the approach to a same phenomenon from different edges, thus obtaining a more complete, enriching, and holistic image of the subject matter. A little known area is that one of Clinical Linguistics.

Objective: To present data about Clinical Linguistics, a discipline which, together with Neurolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Speech Therapy, establish interdisciplinary relations between Linguistics and Medicine, in order to demonstrate the nature and pertinence of this enriched relation.
Material and Methods: The technique used has been the review and bibliographic analysis.
Results: The analysis carried out has allowed to make the importance of this interdisciplinary relation clear inasmuch as Clinical Linguistics offers the specialists those developments which involve two sciences that are clearly established, thus broadening the horizon of knowledge for the treatment of diseases that affect the speech.
Conclusions: Clinical Linguistics is one of the disciplines that widens the spectrum of Applied Linguistics, and constitutes a valid interdisciplinary relation in the advance to a diagnosis and the development of more adequate therapies for speech pathologies. Together with Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics, it expresses the intersection between Medicine and Linguistics, which is little known and sometimes little accepted, but very necessary for the development of both sciences.

Keywords: Interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, Linguistics, Medicine, Clinical Linguistics.