Speech Disorders
- Articulation: This focuses on errors (e.g. distortions and substitutions) in production of individual speech sounds.
- Phonological: This refers to predictable, rule-based errors (e.g. fronting, stopping and final consonant deletion) that affect more than one sound.
- Stuttering: This is also known as a fluency disorder in which a person has difficulty in producing speech in a normal, smooth manner. Individuals may have speech that sounds fragmented, with frequent interruptions and difficulty producing words.
- Apraxia: This is a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to perform learned (familiar) movements on command, even though the command is understood and there is a willingness to perform the movement. Both the desire and the capacity to move are present, but the person simply cannot execute the act.
- Dysarthria: It is normally characterized by slurred or slow speech. Common causes include nervous system (neurological) disorders, such as stroke, brain injury, brain tumors and conditions that cause facial paralysis, tongue or throat muscle weakness.
- Voice: It occurs when voice quality, pitch and loudness differ or are inappropriate for an individual’s age, gender or cultural background.
- Aphasia: It is a disorder that results from damage or injury to language parts of the brain. This is more common among older adults, particularly those who have had a stroke. These individuals have difficulty using or understanding words.
Language Disorders
A language disorder is a communication disorder in which a person has persistent difficulties in learning and using various forms of language (e.g. spoken, written or even sign language). Individuals with a language disorder may have impairments in either their receptive (understanding of language) or expressive (use of language) abilities, or both. This limits the individual’s ability to communicate or effectively participate in a social, academic or professional environment.
Social Communication Disorders
Social communication is the use of language in social contexts. It entails social interaction, social cognition, pragmatics and language processing. Social communication disorders are commonly found among developmentally impaired individuals, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder or Down Syndrome.
Cognitive-communication Disorders
Cognitive-communication disorders are problems with communication that have an underlying cause in a cognitive deficit rather than a primary language or speech deficit. A cognitive-communication disorder results from impaired functioning of one or more cognitive processes, including attention and memory. Examples are: Dementia, due to a stroke or brain injury.
Swallowing or feeding Disorders
- Swallowing: Dysphagia means difficulty with swallowing. It is a symptom, not a disease. This may lead to aspiration (where food or liquid gets into the lungs) and can affect a person at any age, from infants to the elderly.
- Feeding: A feeding disorder, in infancy or early childhood, is a child’s refusal to eat certain food groups, textures, solids or liquids for a period of at least one month, which causes the child to not gain enough weight, grow naturally or cause any developmental delays.
Listening and Auditory Processing Disorder
- Auditory processing: This allows a person to decode the sounds of words. It represents as a disorder, if the individual has difficulty with differentiating between sounds, recalling of auditory information, separating speech signals from noise or decoding of words. Listening comprehension allows him to understand the meaning of the words.
- Listening: This involves higher-level thinking than auditory processing. Listening comprehension describes a person’s ability to understand the meaning of the words he/she heard. This allows the individual to understand the meaning of the words.
