Linda M.L. Khan, MS, CCC-SLP
Linda Khan earned her Speech/Language Pathology Master’s Degree in 1976 from Syracuse University. She began her career in the nearby Marcellus School District, working with K-12 students during the initial years of PL94-142. The unintelligible, language-impaired children on her caseload sparked her interest in phonology as a potentially more effective and efficient therapy approach for children with severe speech sound disorders.
In 1980, Khan joined the developmental pediatric faculty at the University of Texas Medical Branch (Galveston), where she pursued the idea of reducing the time required to complete a thorough phonological analysis. She knew from her four years juggling her public school caseload that the combined assessment would need to take less than one hour, not the several hours that were typical at that time. She concluded that attaching a phonological process analysis grid to a traditional articulation test would greatly reduce the time to assess unintelligible and very young children. By combining articulation with phonological analysis, only one test administration was required, yielding two analyses: traditional IMF articulation errors and phonological patterns. She and Nancy Lewis teamed up to “pursue the dream”, field-testing phonological grids with several articulation tests, which culminated in the 1986 publication of the Khan-Lewis Phonological Analysis, using the target words from the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation.
Since then, Khan has held school-based SLP positions in New York, Texas, California and Florida, has been a transdisciplinary specialist on early intervention teams, and has held clinical faculty positions at several Universities. Of her nearly forty-year career, twenty years were spent working abroad as an International Schools SLP/Special Needs Department head in Germany, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kenya, South Korea and Nigeria. She was Chief, Audiology and Speech Pathology in Frankfurt.
Throughout her career, Khan has focused on the needs of young unintelligible children. By targeting phonological processes first – the building blocks – the children achieved intelligibility more quickly, and became successful communicators sooner.
Khan has earned numerous professional awards, served on advisory boards, and held leadership positions in several speech/language associations, including the Overseas (Europe) Association of Communication Sciences. She has presented seminars worldwide on phonological process analysis and treatment, and has authored articles and two self-instructional texts on phonological process analysis. Currently, Khan is a consultant in the Tampa, FL area.