Speech and Language Impairment
Some conditions that cause adult speech and language difficulties:
Speech Disorders
- Apraxia: a motor disorder caused by brain damage.
- Dysarthria: a speech motor disorder resulted from impaired movement of muscles used for speech production.
- Stuttering: a speech disorder disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words or phrases.
- Voice disorder: is characterized by the abnormal production and/or absences of vocal quality, pitch, loudness, resonance, and/or duration, which is inappropriate for an individual's age and/or sex.
Language Disorders
- Aphasia: an inability to comprehend and formulate language due to brain damage
Medical Conditions
- Stroke
- Brain injury
- Oral Cancer
- Huntington’s Disease: an inherited disease causing the progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain
Speech or language impairment is a communication disorder, such as stuttering impaired articulation of words, a language impairment, or a voice impairment, that adversely affects a student's educational performance. People with speech and language impairment may present with communication problems including:
- Articulation: a difficulty in making certain sounds which may be left off, added, changed, or distorted and makes it hard for people to understand and comprehend
- Fluency: flow of speech is being disrupted with atypical rhythm, abnormal number or repetitions and hesitations
- Voice: problems associated with abnormal pitch, loudness, vocal quality, resonance and loss of endurance.
- Language: impaired ability to comprehend and/or use of words in context, including difficulty in expressing ideas or needs, difficulties in understanding what others are saying or a mixed of both