Why Speech Therapy Is Important
Speech Pathologists study, diagnose and treat communication disorders, including difficulties with the following: speaking, listening, understanding language, reading, writing, social skills, stuttering, using voice or difficulties with swallowing.
All communication disorders have the potential to isolate the individual from his or her social and personal environment. It is therefore necessary to provide appropriate and timely identification , referral and intervention of speech and language disorders.
Roles of a Speech Therapist
Speech-language pathologists work to prevent, assess, diagnose and treat children and adults in the following areas:
- Speech disorders – Articulation, Stuttering, Apraxia, Dysarthria, Voice and Aphasia
- Language disorders – Developmental delay in receptive and/or expressive language
- Social communication – Developmentally impaired, e.g. Autism or Down Syndrome
- Cognitive-communication – Dementia, Stroke or brain injury
- Swallowing disorders – Premature babies or Tracheostomy
- Listening and Auditory Processing disorders
- Literacy
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.
Benefits of Speech Therapy
Speech Therapists help people of all ages with different speech and language disorders, but there are also social benefits that come with therapy.
The First Step: Assessment
The purpose of a speech and language assessment is to determine your child’s strengths and challenges related to a variety of areas and conclude if therapy would be beneficial in further developing skills and aiding his or her ability to communicate effectively with others.
The assessment takes approximately an hour.
We are contracted with most medical aids and do accept private patients. Please contact us for further details.
The Way Forward: Therapy
Speech and language therapy is an intervention service that focuses on improving a child’s speech and/or language abilities to understand and express language, including non-verbal language.
After the assessment, we set up a 30 minute weekly therapy session to address the individual’s needs and help remediate the problem. Therapy will continue on the set schedule as long as the individual is making progress toward their goals, attendance is good and goals are met. Meeting the individual’s goals quickly is the key and requires much effort on the individual’s part with cooperation and focus in therapy sessions, therapist’s part with staying focused on the goal, as well as, the family’s part with providing carryover and monitoring of learned speech exercises at home.
We are contracted with most medical aids and do accept private patients. Please contact us for further details.
