Posts Tagged ‘speech problems’

How to Manage Stuttering

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

A common problem in speech fluency is stuttering. As the child develops his speech, a childhood disorder may be observable. Stuttering is a disorder of childhood (developmental) that is characterized by an abnormally high frequency or duration of stoppages in the forward flow of speech.

Stuttering is sometimes mistaken for normal developmental disfluency. However, a child who  stutters has escape behaviors, avoidance behaviors, and other secondary behaviors called physical concomitants. Stuttering is usually accompanied by eye blinks, head nods, jaw tremors and total body gyrations.

Management For Stuttering

Between the ages 1 ½- 11 years old, stuttering may manifest in some children. However this kind of fluency disorder mostly occurs during early childhood stage, from 2-6 years old. Parents can tell if their children has this condition when the speech has 5% or greater repetitions and 1% or greater prolongations.

Therapeutic intervention is the best approach to help overcome this condition. These include environmental manipulation, direct work with the child, psychological therapy, desensitization therapy, parent-child interaction therapy, fluency-shaping behavioral therapy, and parent and family counseling

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Accidents or Trauma Causes Speech Disorder

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

People who have experienced extreme trauma due to accident may have speech problem. Fear can also inhibit the person especially a child to speak in a normal way, and thus may manifest speech disorder.

Neurogenic Disfluency. This results from an identifiable neuropathology in a person who has no history of fluency problems prior to occurrence of the pathology. Brain problems from accidents may induce disfluency. Neurogenic disfluency has similar characteristics as stuttering, including some physical behaviors like eye blinks and tremors due to lesser control of muscles needed in speech production.

  • Management For Neurogenic Disfluency. Neurogenic disfluency may occur at any age but usually appears during adulthood or among the geriatric population. This condition can be n triggered by strokes, head trauma, extrapyramidal diseases, tumors, dementia, drug usage, anoxia, cryosurgery, viral meningitis, and vascular disease. Ths most effective management of this condition is
    self-monitoring program .

Psychogenic Disfluency. People with no evidence of neurological dysfunction and no history of developmental stuttering can have psychogenic disfluency due to identifiable emotional crisis. This can be further grouped into three categories namely: emotionally based, manipulative, and malingering disfluencies. A very good example of  this kind of disfluency is when a person stutters when a specific other is around. For instance, a son who is afraid of his father, starts to stutter every time his father is around but speaks fluently when around his friends and family.

  • Management For Psychogenic Disfluency. This  condition can be observable when 90% of the patient’s utterances have become disfluent when the emotional stimuli is present. It is something psychological in nature. The cause could be acute or chronic psychological disturbances like some family problem . Stress is another factor that may also cause the disorder.

    Although other social and behavioral specialists can help in this condition like the psychologists, psychiatrist and counselors, the speech pathologists prioritize treatment only of the bad speech habits. This may still be present after resolving the emotional issues of the patient.

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Kinds of Speech Problems

Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

What speech problems needs therapy?

Speech problems are of three kinds. These are articulation disorders, resonance or voice disorders,  and fluency disorders.

  • Articulation Disorders. Articulation disorders are problems with physical features used for articulation such as the lips, tongue, teeth, hard and soft palate, jaws and inner cheeks. Any one with articulation disorder experiences problem producing words or syllables properly.
  • Resonance or voice disorders. Voice Disorders cover problems regarding phonation or the production of the raw sound itself. An example of this is  when the sound produced by the larynx or voice box seems to be muffled, nasal, intermittent, weak, too loud or any other characteristic not pertaining to normal.
  • Fluency Disorders. Fluency Disorders include problems like stuttering.This is a speech problem where your speech is constantly interrupted by blocks, fillers, stoppages, repetitions or sound prolongations.Talking too fast such that people can’t understand you is another fluency disorder called cluttering.

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Speech Therapy

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

What Speech Therapy Is

If you have problems dealing with speech, then you have to undergo speech therapy. Speech therapy is a a treatment dealing with speech problems that an individual may encounter. But Speech Pathology encompasses more than speech problems, it also includes language and other communication problems. these problems may have been congenital (due to birth) or acquired (due to accidents or other misfortunes.)

Speech therapy, thus is a treatment that individuals can undergo through in order to fix their speech problems. It  would focus on fixing speech related problems. Problems related to vocal pitch, volume, tone, rhythm and articulation may be resolved through speech therapy.

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