A number of ready-made phonological assessment procedures have become available to the clinical and educational professions over recent years. It is suggested that the scope of most procedures is unnecessarily
narrow; there is no justification for the continuing omission of vowels
and prosodic systems from such assessments. The impressionistic
transcription on which assessments are based is subjective, imprecise
and unreliable. The usefulness of the results, particularly with regard to
the measurement of intelligibility and the differential diagnosis of
disorders, is much exaggerated. Concern is expressed that clinicians'
disillusionment over assessment procedures failing to live up to the
claims made for them might lead to a reaction against clinical linguistic
procedures in general.
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