Every day we use language to communicate, express and share our ideas, thoughts, emotions and feelings to our surrounding people. Disordered speech stumble us to carry the messages properly. Truly it is a problematic situation for those people suffering the disorder. It may occur at any time and without any specific reason ranging from a minor to an adult. Usually physical impairments, hearing loss, excessive drug abuse, brain or physical injury etc. are responsible for the problem.
Naturally speech development among the children occurs within 48 months after its birth. The process may be a bit slower in some cases. The kid may have problems with articulating muscles to utter sounds, or cannot coordinate the articulation orders. All these symptoms will disappear by the fourth year of the child. But a total failure to produce meaningful sentences after the age should be considered as speech disorder.
In cases of adults, it may happen at any time without any prior notification.
There are several types of speech disorders such as stammering, cluttering, voice disorders, muteness and many more. All these problems cause a common trouble�”difficulty in producing sounds or sentences. Muteness is another form of this disorder, and refers to the inability to speak at all. People suffering through such problems cannot articulate speeches or just fail to apprehend the meaning of what they learn. It also can cause phonemic and phonetic problems during conversation. They may jumble words or sentences while speaking.
Causes:
The problem does not have any specific reason, and the degree may vary in characters. Fortunately it is not like other fatal diseases taking the tolls of human lives. It might happen due to:
Impaired Speech Organs: There are some sound articulating muscles inside our throat such as teeth, velum, glottis, lips, tongue etc. Any impairment of these organs may cause speech disorder
Brain malfunction: We use brain to realise the speeches we attend and deliver. Besides, brain moves our limbs during a conversation. In a word brain controls every movement of a body. A damaged or malfunctioned brain (by hit, accident or stroke) reduces the ability to understand language or sound.
Abuse of vocal cords: Vocal cords help to produce clear and strong sounds from the throat. But excessive use of the cords like nonstop shouting at louder scales or singing loudly without amplifiers may damage them. Consequently, they cannot produce the required speeches.
Hearing Loss: It is another reason for speech disorder. People having the problem, will suffer from the disorder. Mostly the deaf people cannot hear what is being spoken, they become unfamiliar with sound and sentences. Thus they cannot produce any meaningful statements.
Heredity: Speech disorder is a kind of genetic problem. If any member of the family owns any one of the problem, possibly it will run amid the other family members.
Effects
The impacts of speech disorder are far reaching in our life. It reduces the social communication ability of a person and makes him/her weak psychologically. Most often people suffer from inferiority complex having long term effects on them. People even turn mute. But the worst effect of the disorder is leading people to suicide.
Healing:
There is no common way to prevent speech disorder. Consult with a speech pathologist whenever you notice your child is missing speeches continuously. It can save the kid from suffering a long term speech disorder in his/ her life. The treatment for speech disorder is not an expensive one, and some of the cases it needs no treatment at all. Speech pathology and therapy, right medical attention, special educational programmes- are some of the treating measures to solve the problem. At times traditional methods like aromatherapy, hypnotism, yoga can also improve the situation.