What Is Speech Disorder?
A speech disorder is defined as any pathological condition that limits the individual’s ability to produce sounds and create words. The main regions of the body that are involved in speech production are the mouth, neck, thorax, and abdominal regions. Speech disorder has been popularly misinterpreted as a language disorder, but in reality, it is a communication disorder, and it does not involve any language.
The difference between a speech disorder and a language disorder is that in a speech disorder, the person is unable to form sounds and words. In language disorder, the affected person is unable to understand and learn the words of a language. Both diseases make it difficult for the person to express his or her thoughts and communicate. Though it is a physical condition, it affects the affected individuals mentally also due to the stigma and discrimination expressed against them by peers and society.
What Are the Types of Speech Disorders?
Speech disorders can occur at any age. The cause of the condition is diverse among different people and ages. The term speech disorder is an umbrella term to explain many different problems under it. The different types of speech disorders are stuttering, apraxia, and dysarthria.
What Is Stuttering Disorder?
Stuttering is a speech disorder in which the individual’s flow of speech is affected. The person will have pauses and breaks in his sentence formation. The symptoms presented are repetitions of vowels, sounds, words, or blocks where the individual struggles to produce the sound he wishes to produce, and prolongations where the individual drags certain words or sounds.
Stuttering usually worsens in certain situations like excitement, happiness, anger, and fear. This condition causes both behavioral and physical symptoms such as tension in the person’s face and shoulders, rapid blinking of eyes, tremors of the lips, clenched fists, and sudden head movements. Stuttering is classified into two types, namely developmental stuttering and neurogenic stuttering.
Developmental stuttering is defined as stuttering that occurs in young children who are still learning speech. There is a strong genetic influence from the parents and grandparents who had similar problems of this type. Neurogenic stuttering is when the individual stutters while speaking due to some pathological condition or accident that has damaged the brain like a stroke or a tumor.
What Is Apraxia?
Apraxia is a disease of motor neurons. It occurs mainly when the posterior parietal cortex of the brain is damaged. The individual's motor planning ability is severely affected and the person is unable to perform voluntary movements. The type of apraxia that affects the speech of an individual is known as apraxia of speech. This condition is commonly diagnosed in childhood. In this condition, there is either weakening or paralysis of the muscles that help to produce sound.
What Is Dysarthria?
The primary problem in dysarthria is muscle weakness in a person’s face, lips, neck, thorax, or abdomen. The affected patients present with symptoms such as slurred speech, mumbling of words, speed of speaking being either too low or it is too fast, soft and feeble speech and difficulty in the movement of the tongue or mouth.
What Are the Causes of Speech Disorders?
The cause of speech disorders is not the same for all people affected by speech disorders. It varies based on age, and the specific type of disorder the individual is affected with. The common causes are brain damage that is due to a stroke or an accident and muscle weakness due to diseases like myasthenia gravis (weakness and quick tiredness of any muscles one can control voluntarily). The other causes are damaged vocal cords, degenerative brain diseases like Huntington’s disease (gradual loss (degeneration) of brain nerve cells), Parkinson’s disease (a neurological condition that results in unintentional or uncontrollable movements, including shaking, stiffness, and issues with balance and coordination), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, dementia (the decrease in thinking, remembering, and reasoning skills), cancers that originate in the mouth or throat, autism (a developmental condition that manifests symptoms in the first three years of life), Down syndrome, and hearing loss.
What Are the Symptoms of Speech Disorders?
Though each speech disorder presents with its own unique symptoms, there is still a combination of symptoms that helps doctors strongly suspect a speech disorder. They are repeating and prolonging sounds causing distortion of noises, adding different sounds and syllables while using simple words, and rearranging syllables. They also have difficulties in pronouncing words correctly, struggling to speak out the exact word they have in their minds, having a loud or rough voice, and speaking in a very soft tone. These symptoms alone are not enough to diagnose the type of speech disorder; it would involve a series of diagnostic tests to diagnose accurately.
What Are the Risk Factors of Speech Disorders?
Certain risk factors can increase the likelihood of getting affected by speech disorders. It includes being a boy child who was delivered prematurely, and low birth weight. The other risk factors are vertical infections like rubella during pregnancy that might cause hearing loss, a strong family history of speech disorders, and a history of diseases that have affected the ears, nose, and throat.
How to Diagnose Speech Disorder?
The health professional who deals with individuals affected by speech disorders is known as a speech-language pathologist. The speech-language pathologist will elicit a thorough history that includes family and past medical history. They will also evaluate for a group of symptoms that might indicate speech disorders. Based on the symptoms that are present, they will diagnose the speech disorder accurately. They will also need to evaluate the presence of difficulty or irregularity in the movement of the affected individual’s lip, jaw, and tongue. A series of diagnostic tests would be required to confirm the initial diagnosis of the speech-language pathologist. The Denver articulation screening examination will be done to inspect the clarity of the individual’s pronunciation. A prosody voice screening profile (PVSP) is used to check multiple aspects of speech in the clinical setting. This test is capable of evaluating the person’s pitch of speech, phrasing, speech patterns, and also speaking volume. The dynamic evaluation of the motor speech skills manual (DEMSS) is a comprehensive guide that is very helpful in diagnosing speech disorders.
How to Treat Speech Disorder?
The treatment is focused on treating the underlying cause based on the severity of the speech disorder. Treatment options include speech therapy exercises, physical exercises to treat muscle weakness, target selection, contextual utilization, contrast therapy, oral motor therapy, ear device if the cause is hearing loss, etc. Speech disorders can affect a person’s self-esteem and can even cause depression and anxiety disorders. In those conditions, the help of a psychologist might also be needed.
Conclusion
The awareness about speech disorders is not widespread equally among different populations of the world. When anyone in the family or workplace seems to have a speech disorder they must be guided appropriately for treatment with a speech-language pathologist. Discrimination against individuals suffering from speech disorders must be strictly avoided.
