Communication Disorders Overview

• Communication Disorder: impairment in the ability to send, receive, process, and comprehend concepts

  • Includes verbal, nonverbal, and graphic symbols

• Speech Disorder: verbal communication noticeably deviant from the norm that is interferes with communication

  • 3 types: articulation, fluency, and voice disorders​

  • Continues past age-appropriate time frame

• Language Disorder: impaired comprehension and/or use of spoken, written, and/or other symbol system

  • Can involve: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and/or pragmatics​

• Hearing Impairment: impaired auditory sensitivity

  • Hard of hearing or deaf​

• Central Auditory Processing Disorder: difficulties with information processing of auditory signals

  • not related to hearing impairment​

• Articulation: the totality of motor processes that results in speech

  • sequencing and timing of muscle activity is crucial​

• Speech sounds: physical sound realities

  • end product of articulation​

  • aka phones and phonetic variation

• Phoneme: smallest linguistic unit that can combine with other units to establish and distinguish meaning

• Allophone: variations in phonemes that do not change the meaning 

• Phonotactics: allowed combinations of phonemes in a language

• Minimal pair: words that vary only by one phonetic feature

• Phonetic inventory: list of all phones within a person's inventory

  • includes all the sounds and their variations​

• Phonemic inventory: list of all phonemes within a child's system

  • phonemes that are used to contrast and differentiate meaning​

  • child should have complete phonemic inventory by age 8

• Phonotactic constraints: limited use of phonemes and the phonemes/phones
  that are possible in word positions

  • ex. in Standard American English, words don't end in /h/​

• Constraints: patterns that limit production possibilities
  
   

Phonological

• Phonological impairment

  • Most common type of SSD

  • A cognitive-linguistic difficulty with learning the phonological system of language; characterized by pattern-based speech errors such as replacing velar sounds with something else

  • Impaired comprehension of the sound system of language and the rules that govern sound combinations

  • More likely to be idiosyncratic (weird, like “badedi” instead of “psegeti” like a typically developing child might say)

  • There is a pattern

  • Phonological delay

    • phonological patterns evident in typically developing younger children​

  • Consistent phonological disorder

    • consistent use of non developmental error patterns​

    • may be idiosyncratic errors

  • Inconsistent speech disorder

    • Characterized by inconsistent productions of the same word

    • Problem associated with phonological assembly difficulty (difficulty selecting and sequencing phonemes for words) without accompanying oromotor difficulty

    • Vowels are usually ok.

    • Check history, maybe they had otitis media
      
       

Motor Speech

• Articulation impairment

  • Subcategory of speech disorder

  • Difficulty with motor production of speech or inability to produce certain sounds

  • Substitutions, omissions, additions or distortions 

  • Errors often involving sibilants and/or rhotic: s, z, r, er,

  • Motor speech difficulty involving physical production 

  • Speech perception difficulties may underlie an articulation impairment.

  • Other terms: misarticulations, residual articulations errors, common clinical manifestations, persistent speech errors

• Childhood apraxia of speech

  • Motor speech disorder associated with difficulty planning and programming movement sequences, resulting in dysprosody and errors in speech sound production

  • Various terms: developmental dyspraxia, developmental verbal dyspraxia, developmental dyspraxia of speech

  • Errors get worse with many syllables and words together

  • Inconsistent errors

• Childhood dysarthria

  • Motor speech disorder involving difficulty with the sensorimotor control processes involved in the production of speech, typically motor programming and execution

  • Often result from neurological impairment during or after birth, through traumatic brain injury or neurological condition

  • Six types: flaccid, spastic, hyperkinetic, hypokinetic, ataxic, and mixed

  • Always involves weakness