Fluency Disorders
a. Stuttering / Stammering
Stuttering also known as stammering, is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words or phrases as well as involuntary silent pauses or blocks in which the person who stutters is unable to produce sounds.
Types of Stammering:
| Normal disfluency | |
| Developmental stuttering | |
| Acquired stuttering |
Characteristics of stammering:
| Repeating sounds / syllables / words / phrases | |
| Silent blocks | |
| Prolongation of sounds | |
| Filled and Unfilled pauses | |
| Hesitations | |
| Word substitutions |
Seek help from a Speech Language Pathologist
| SLP makes an appropriate diagnosis and treatment program based on the severity of the stuttering. | |
| Attain speech therapy and learn the techniques to overcome stuttering. | |
| Drug therapy does not help stuttering. |
b. Cluttering
Cluttering (also called Tachyphemia) is a speech and communication disorder characterized by a rapid rate of utterances making speech difficult to understand, erratic rhythm, poor syntax or grammar, and words or groups of words unrelated to the sentence.
Characteristics of cluttering may include:
| An excessive number of disfluencies, the majority of which are not typical of people with stammring. | |
| The frequent placement of pauses and use of prosodic patterns that do not conform to syntactic and semantic constraints. | |
| Inappropriate (usually excessive) degrees of coarticulation among sounds, especially in multisyllabic words. |
Management of fluency disorders may include:
| Speech and Language evaluation | |
| Fluency therapy | |
| Articulation therapy | |
| Support group programs | |
| Counseling |
Articulation Disorders
a. Misarticulation
Misarticulation is defined as disorders of the quality of speech characterized by the substitution, omission, distortion, and addition of phonemes.
b. Hypernasal speech:
Hypernasal speech (medically known as Rhinolalia aperta) is a disorder that causes abnormal resonance in a human's voice due to increased airflow through the nose during speech. It is caused by an open nasal cavity resulting from an incomplete closure of the soft palate and/or velopharyngeal sphincter.
c. Cleft lip and palate:
Cleft lip and cleft palate, which can also occur together as cleft lip and palate, are variations of a type of congenital deformity caused by abnormal facial development during gestation. A cleft is a fissure or opening—a gap. It is the non-fusion of the body's natural structures that form before birth.
Management of articulation disorders may include:
| Speech and Language evaluation | |
| Hearing evaluation | |
| Surgery | |
| Articulation therapy | |
| Feeding therapy |