Common Speech Disorders Requiring Speech Therapy
Approximately 40 million Americans have communication disorders. These disorders affect how you deliver words, sounds, and how you communicate with others.
Producing speech includes the coordination of many things, including:
- Thinking, remembering, and organizing your thoughts.
- Listening and understanding what you hear.
- Retrieving words.
- Arranging words in the proper syntactic order.
- Coordinating respiration and phonation to speak with adequate volume and vocal quality.
- Using prosody and tone to convey emotion.
- Coordinating the speech mechanism to articulate desired sounds.
Below, you will find three of the most common disorders that your speech language pathologist can help you with.
Aphasia
Aphasia is an acquired, neurological language disorder that can affect the way you understand and express verbal or written language. Adults can develop aphasia following brain damage, such as traumatic brain injury (TBI), cerebrovascular accident (CVA), brain tumors, or other neurological diseases.
There are several types of aphasia, all ranging in severity. Each person’s experience is unique and even a mild issue can significantly impact quality of life. Global aphasia, Broca’s aphasia (non-fluent), and Wernicke’s aphasia (fluent) are most common. Depending on your diagnosis, you may experience fragmented speech, problems with word retrieval, or difficulty understanding what you hear if people speak to quickly or within group conversation.
Apraxia
Acquired apraxia of speech is another type of neurologically-based speech disorder that can occur following a neurological injury, such as CVA, or from a progressive condition, such as dementia. Apraxia is a moto speech disorder , meaning that the brain has difficulty planning and sequencing the motor movements necessary to speak. The relationship between knowing what you want to say and making your tongue, lips and jaw make the requisite movements is interrupted.
You may show signs of verbal apraxia if you have slow, effortful speech, inconsistent errors when trying to speak, difficulty initiating words, issues with adding or omitting sounds, or groping (i.e., trying to move your lips, jaw, and tongue to make a particular sound but not quite being able to do so accurately).
Dysarthria
Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder that occurs when the muscles required for speech are weak or uncoordinated due to brain damage. Dysarthria can affect your respiration, phonation, and articulation, making it challenging to speak with adequate loudness and clarity.
This neurologically-based speech disorder may result from illnesses such as CVA, Parkinson’s disease, atypical parkinsonism, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Huntington’s disease, or multiple sclerosis (MS). If you have dysarthria, your speech may sound slurred, mumbled, or too fast or slow. People with dysarthria may find it difficult to participate in social situations such as speaking on the phone or meeting up with friends due to reduced intelligibility.
How Long Does Speech Therapy Last for Adults?
As adults, we have deeply ingrained habits that impact how we speak and communicate. Working on these habits may take some time to master and feel natural. Motivation and intensity of practice are factors that most significantly affect how quickly you see results in your individual program. Other factors include your specific goals, the extent of your neurological injury, and your feelings or beliefs about your communication difficulties.
For example, participatinf in an intensive program post-stroke or for cognitive-communication disorders with speech sessions four to five times a week for one of more hours each day combined with a home exercise program will generally lead to significant improvement in one month.
If you are participating in speech therapy to improve the clarity of your speech, fluency, voice, or public speaking skills, you can expect to see results within one to three months. Individual goals may vary, and you can continue speech exercise sessions to meet your specific needs.
