Abstract

Speech-language pathology is an interdisciplinary field which began its development in the early XVIIIth century. Modern speech-language pathology, for its part, has arisen in postmodernity and is based on discoveries in classical sciences. The constructs of sciences, whether new, redefined or reinvented, are produced in and by a scientific community that agrees on the definitions, presuppositions and objectives of the knowledge being constructed (Fourez 1998). For this reason, interdisciplinarity can only be defined by enhancing the precision of terms that are still sufficiently vague to be considered as synonymous by some researchers and theorists. A clear understanding of this terminology requires a literature review and leads to the use of a common vocabulary that aims to increase the transparency and accessibility of concepts and models that stem from the precisions provided to these definitions. Over time, concepts evolve, are refined, are defined more precisely and they eventually circumscribe a previously unexplored reality. To frame speech-language pathology in an interdisciplinary perspective, a review of the literature was conducted to define terms that are sometimes used in parallel, at times positioned in a hierarchy or used interchangeably.”