Research Priority of Clinical Linguistics in Iran

Study in clinical linguistics can reflect and requirements of this area, and can contribute to effective and useful changes in this area. Since there have been a few studies in the field of clinical linguistics in Iran, this research can pave the way to find research priorities of clinical linguistics in our country. Studies related to linguistics and speech therapy were collected and studied since their appearance in the literature up to 2012 to determine the number of studies performed on clinical linguistics and its evolutionary trend. The most and least numbers of studies conducted by speech therapists on linguistics are related to phonetics/phonology (37%) and pragmatics (14%), respectively. In linguistics, there are a few studies on disorders (0.02%), which are mostly in the domain of aphasia (40%); therefore, other disorders should be investigated too. The number of linguistic studies on language and speech therapy is more than that of the studies in which clinical data are used to study the theories and hypotheses. Therefore, it is necessary to consider this area seriously and guide the studies toward the theories proposed in the related disorders. Thus, attention must be paid to pragmatic and semantic domains of the disorder which are considered less.