Speech Therapist

WHO IS A SPEECH LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST (SLP) AND WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF SPEECH AND LANGUAGE DISORDERS!!!

Who is a speech therapist

A person who specializes in the diagnostic procedures, evaluation techniques, assessment tools and various therapeutic techniques related to different communitive disorders.

What is speech therapy?

Speech therapy is rehabilitative procedure undertaken to help the people having any kind of communication disorders or problems and some swallowing problems.

Various Types of Speech and Language Disorders Are As Follows

  • Stuttering (Stammering) 
  • Voice Disorders
  • Language Disorders
  • Aphasia
  • Articulation Disorders

Neurogenic Speech & Swallowing Disorders

  • Dysarthia
  • Apraxia of speech
  • Dysphagia
  • Aphasia (Motor)

Psychological, Emotional and behavioral based communication disorders:

  • Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
  • Autism
  • Anxiety, depression and phobias

Stuttering (Stammering)

  • Stammering is a frequent disruption in the fluency of verbal expression and is a multi dimensional problem.
  • It is best categorised as a cluster of a particular kind of speech behaviour, feelings, believes, self concepts and social interactions.
  • It may be characterised by: Blocking, Prolongations, pauses and repetitions.
  • With wide variety of secondary behaviours or symptoms such as:
  • Eye blinking, facial grimaces, head / body jerking and shaking the hands and limbs etc

Voice Disorders

  • Voice is a sound produced by the speech organs – Called The vocal cords.
  • A patient’s voice may become soft, harsh, breathy, hoarse, hypo or hyper nasal or even aphonic. A patient may even suffer from voice loss due to laryngectomy or Tracheostomy.
  • Dysphonia refers to the impairment of voice.

Language Disorders

In language disorders the person is either unable to comprehend the symbols of language used by the speakers or he does not have the ability to use the language symbols on his own.

Difficulty in:

  • Comprehension of language
  • Expression of language

Language Disorders - Causes & Types

  • Mental Retardation
  • Lack of environmental Speech Language Stimulation
  • Hearing loss
  • Behaviour problems
  • Speech Language Delay due to multiple reasons e.g Hyperactivity, Brain disorders, Autism, Learning Disability.

Receptive Language Disorders

  • Comprehension or understanding may be impaired.

Expressive Language Disorders.

  • Expression by the use of words, sentences, phrases, signs, gestures, facial expressions, body language may be impaired.

Aphasia

  • Aphasia is an acquired language disorder caused by brain damage, resulting in partial or complete impairment of language comprehension, formulation and the use for communication.
  • In aphasia there is a break down in the ability of a person to formulate or to retrieve and to decode the arbitrary symbols of language.

Types:

  • Fluent (Sensory): Wernicke’s, Conduction, Anomic, Transcortical.
  • Non Fluent (Motor): Broca’s and Transcortical Motor Aphasia
  • Global or Mixed Aphasia.

Articulation Disorders

Articulation refers to the movement of the articulators (speech organs such as tongue, lips, palate and teeth) in the production of speech sounds that make up the words of our language.

Types of Articulation Errors

  • Substitution
  • Omission
  • Distortion
  • Addition etc

Articulation Disorders - Causes:

  • Orofacial Anomalies Eg.: Cleft lip and palate
  • Dysarthria
  • Oral Apraxia
  • Cerebral Palsy
  • Hearing Impairment
  • Tongue Tie
  • Malocclusion

Dysarthria

  • Dysarthia comprises of a group of related motor speech disorders.
  • Often patients may be distressed and frustrated by their impaired or total lack of physical state.
  • They may lack motivation and tire easily
  • They may experience a sense of loss of status with in their families and society and they may be suffering from a progressive, degenerative neurological disease.

Dysarthria - Causes and Types:

  • Parkinson’s disease. Multiple Sclerosis, Pseudobalbar Palsy or Motor Neuron Disease etc.
  • In addition one must consider the countless number of brain damage patients, whose dysarthria is due to acute trauma, tumor, inflammatory disease or stroke.
  • Flaccid
  • Spastic
  • Ataxic
  • Hypokinetic and Hyperkinetic
  • Mixed Dysarthria

Autism

It is a developmental disability significantly affecting verbal and non verbal communication and social interaction, that adversely effects educational performance, involving extreme sense of isolation and detachment, from the world around them that characterise these individuals who are ‘Autistic’

Speech Therapy and Disability

  • The impaired hearing either in childhood or adulthood lead to communicative disorders or speech and language delays or dysfluent speech or may result in deaf-mutism.
  • Speech therapy procedures helps the hearing impaired individuals specially children to acquire maximum of their interactive and communicative potentials.

Speech Therapy and Disability

  • Speech and language therapy helps the disabled or impaired individual by providing maximum communicative potential, compensatory metholds, rehabilitation and mainstreaming.
  • Early diagnosis, teatment and interventing the communicative problem will reduce the intensity and serverity of the problem which enhances the effectiveness of the speech language therapy and the patient’s quality of life.