A speech disorder is a condition that causes problems for the patient who suffers from it in creating or forming the speech sounds necessary to properly develop oral language and communicate with others. Dr. Sanchez Lopez, a rehabilitation physician and speech therapist, discusses the most common speech disorders and the treatments that are used to treat them.
What speech disorders are there?
There are different types of speech-related disorders:
- Phonological disorder or dyslalia: different errors occur in the articulation of words, the most frequent being the substitution, distortion, omission or insertion of sounds.
- Dysphemia: stuttering or fluency disorder of childhood onset. It is a disorder centered on speech performance, specifically its fluency and rhythm. During the emission of speech, the sufferer suffers one or more spasms or blockages that interrupt the normal rhythm of communication. Dysphemia often causes embarrassment and anxiety, makes communication and social adaptation difficult. This problem only appears when talking to someone, but the affected child can speak normally in complete solitude, and is not due to brain or perceptual lesions.
- Dysarthria: manifests as difficulty articulating words due to a neurological problem that causes the mouth and the muscles that emit speech to lack proper muscle tone and, therefore, to not respond correctly. It is one of the best known types of speech disorders.
- Social communication disorder: those who suffer from this disorder have problems in adapting communication to the context in which they find themselves, as well as in understanding the metaphorical or implicit meaning of what is said to them, grasping gestures or respecting turns of speech.
- Dysglossia: is a disorder that causes severe difficulty in articulating the sounds that make up speech due to the presence of alterations in the orophonatory organs themselves, such as congenital malformations.
- Tachyphemia or mumbling: it is characterized by an exaggeratedly fast speech, losing words along the way and making mistakes.
- Aphasia: this is one of the best known disorders. It consists of the loss or alteration of language in adults (in children we would be dealing with the previously mentioned dysphasia) due to the presence of a brain alteration or lesion.
What are the treatments and solutions?
Treatment is usually focused on both the child and the parents, since it is usually necessary to modify certain attitudes (overprotection or lack of stimulation) and to teach techniques that help stimulate the child’s language.
In any case, it is advisable to start reeducation as early as possible, since it has been shown that if there is an early delay, language delay will show up later, together with socialization difficulties.
It should also be taken into account that children with language delay are more likely to have difficulties in learning to read and write, so it may also be considered necessary to work on these learning areas.
In case of any doubt, go to the Phoniatrician, after the clinical assessment, he/she will issue a diagnosis and will prescribe the most appropriate speech therapy treatment with the corresponding follow-up.