What Is A Speech Disorder?
A speech disorder is the inability to produce sounds correctly, to speak fluently or use a person’s voice effectively. Articulatory distortions result from organic (a known physical cause) or functional (no known cause) causes. Examples of organic causes would be hearing loss, cleft palate, cerebral palsy, apraxia, dysarthria etc. An articulation disorder is usually considered diagnosed when the errors involve 4-6 phonemes. A phoneme is perceived, audible sounds (i.e. consonants, vowels) in a language that distinguish one word from another.
One part of a child’s development is phonological development. Phonological development is the process the child goes through to organize and distinguish between different sounds which a child segments into units. For example, through the course of this period the child begins hearing a constant stream of sounds which he/she then breaks down into units which are words. The child isolates a word and then assigns meaning to that word based on environmental cues and verbal behavior. Children have distinguished stages of phoneme acquisition based on phoneme development. Due to this, a speech pathologist can identify weather or not a phonological is within typical developmental patterns or not. Children attempt to mimic adult speech using phonological development while the child continues to acquire the specific sound. When this sound is not acquired within the development timeline the child continues to immitted, delete or distort this sound to come as close to the sound as possible.
Signs of a Speech Disorder:
Articulation disorder involves the substitution, deletion, addition or changes of sound. (i.e. fwog for frog).
Phonological Processing involves typical speech development patterns of error used by children when they are trying to mimic adult speech. Phonological Disorder happen when a child continues making the sound error beyond the age when the process should have disappeared or what is considered “developmentally typical.” Typical patterns can be divided into 3 groups substitution, syllable structure and assimilation.
Fluency is speech that flows in smoothly in a rhythmic manner. Disfluencies are disruptions or in the flow speech. There are two different types: stuttering and cluttering.
Stuttering is comprised of repetitions, prolongations, Interjections, Silent pauses, broken words, incomplete phrases, and revisions. People that stutter also display associated motor speech behaviors called concomitant behaviors, such as facial grimacing, throat clearing, facial tightness. Etc. The physiological factors include the body parts associated with motor speech. These include the respiratory, articulatory, phonatory and prosodic pattern of speech. Stuttering is a debilitating condition and no matter the severity level negative feelings and attitudes can influence the person who stutters.
Cluttering is a communication disorder that can affect four major components of communication which include articulation, language, fluency, and voice. It affects fluency and can exist in the same person. Characteristics vary from person to person, but most do display a rapid rate of speech. It takes a trained speech pathologist to diagnose and treat.