Language Disorders

Language acquisition

• Occurs with uniformity and rapidity
• Supports the hypothesized existence of innate, genetically determined Universal Grammars
• Recently proposed a combination of traditional learning and innate language modules.

Disfluencies in Children

• Almost all children go through a stage of frequent disfluency
• usually between the ages of 2 and 5.
• Speech is produced easily in spite of the disfluencies.

Etiology of Speech & Language Disorders

• Mental retardation
• Hearing loss
• Maturation delay (developmental language delay)
• Expressive language disorder (developmental expressive aphasia)

• Bilingualism
• Psychosocial deprivation
• Autism
• Elective mutism
• Receptive aphasia
• Cerebral palsy

Overview of major types of speech disorders

• Definitions vary, but generally agree that speech disorders involve deviations of sufficient magnitude to interfere with communication.
• They draw attention to the speaking act and away from the message

1. Fluency Disorders

• Speech is characterized by repeated interruptions, hesitations, or repetitions
• Stuttering is by far the most well-known fluency disorder

1. Fluency disorders - Stuttering

• Flow of speech is abnormally interrupted by repetitions, blocking, or prolongations of sounds, syllables, words, or phrases
• Very familiar, but actually quite rare – only 1-5% of the population.
• Articulation disorders actually occur much more frequently than stuttering

Stuttering -- Causes

• Still a mystery
• Three perspectives:
• Symptom of emotional disturbance
• Result of biological makeup
• Learned response

Stuttering

• Disorder of speech fluency that interrupts the forward flow of speech.
• All individuals are disfluent at times
• Differentiated by the kind and amount of the disfluencies