Turku, Finland

Psychology and Speech and Language Pathology

Table of contents

⇑Psychology and Speech and Language Pathology at Åbo Akademi University

Language: English Studies in English
Subject area: languages
University website: www.abo.fi
Type: PhD/Doctoral programme
Duration: 4 years

⇑Definitions and quotes

Language
Language is a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so; and a language is any specific example of such a system.
Pathology
Pathology (from the Greek roots of pathos (πάθος), meaning "experience" or "suffering" and -logia (-λογία), "study of") is a significant field in modern medical diagnosis and medical research, concerned mainly with the causal study of disease, whether caused by pathogens or non-infectious physiological disorder.
Psychology
Psychology is the science of behavior and mind, including conscious and unconscious phenomena, as well as feeling and thought. It is an academic discipline of immense scope and diverse interests that, when taken together, seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, and all the variety of epiphenomena they manifest. As a social science it aims to understand individuals and groups by establishing general principles and researching specific cases.
Speech
Speech is the vocalized form of communication used by humans and some animals, which is based upon the syntactic combination of items drawn from the lexicon. Each spoken word is created out of the phonetic combination of a limited set of vowel and consonant speech sound units (phonemes). These vocabularies, the syntax that structures them, and their sets of speech sound units differ, creating many thousands of different, and mutually unintelligible, human languages. The vocal abilities that enable humans to produce speech also enable them to sing.
Speech
If you your lips would keep from slips,
Five things observe with care;
To whom you speak, of whom you speak,
And how, and when, and where.
W. E. Norris, Thirlby Hall, Volume I, p. 315.
Language
Many languages fly around the world
producing sparks when they collide
sometimes of hate
sometimes of love
Bei Dao, "Language", in The August Sleepwalker, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall (New York: New Directions, 1990), p. 121
Psychology
The popular medical formulation of morality that goes back to Ariston of Chios, "virtue is the health of the soul," would have to be changed to become useful, at least to read: "your virtue is the health of your soul." For there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures. Even the determination of what is healthy for your body depends on your goal, your horizon, your energies, your impulses, your errors, and above all on the ideals and phantasms of your soul. Thus there are innumerable healths of the body; and the more we allow the unique and incomparable to raise its head again, and the more we abjure the dogma of the "equality of men," the more must the concept of a normal health, along with a normal diet and the normal course of an illness, be abandoned by medical men. Only then would the time have come to reflect on the health and illness of the soul, and to find the peculiar virtue of each man in the health of his soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche‎‎, The Gay Science, § 120 “Health of the Soul”
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