Dysphagia

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Dysphagia (difficulties in swallowing) can occur at the oral, pharyngeal or oesophageal stages. It may occur due to a variety of medical conditions. Risks of dysphagia include dehydration and malnutrition as well as aspiration pneumonia. Choking, coughing, pain or discomfort while eating, as well as frequent chest infections are potential warning signs of dysphagia.

 

Voice

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Voice disorders may occur due to a variety of medical conditions. These may be structural, neurogenic, or functional. This may result in limited voicing ability or a change in the quality of voice such as volume, pitch or intonation. LSVT LOUD is a specialized program designed to treat patients with voice difficulties as a result of Parkinson’s Disease but may be effective in other voice conditions. 

 

Dysarthria

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Dysarthria is a speech disorder that is characterized by weakness of the muscles that are used for speech. Dysarthria can occur with other speech or language impairments. Signs of dysarthria include:

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• Speech that is either too slow or too fast

• Reduced speech volume

• Slurred or unintelligible speech quality

• Robotic speech quality 

• Hyper-nasal or hypo-nasal speech quality

• Breathy or strained speech

 

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Aphasia

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Aphasia is an acquired neurological language disorder which may affect your receptive language, expressive language, writing skills and reading skills. There are a variety of classification systems used to describe the various deficits of aphasia and your symptoms may overlap between various classifications. 

 

Apraxia

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Apraxia of speech is a neurological impairment that affects the ability to plan sensorimotor commands needed to produce speech (phonetics and prosody), i.e. you have difficulty getting messages from your brain to your speech muscles to make them move. Apraxia of speech does not involve muscle weakness however it can occur together with dysarthria and or aphasia. 

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Cognitive communication impairments

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Examples of cognitive communication impairments can include difficulties with memory, attention, problem solving, planning, sequencing, and executive functioning. These impairments may affect verbal and non-verbal communication for example, difficulty with listening, reading, writing, and processing information. 

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Pragmatic impairments

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Pragmatics refers to the social language skills that are non-verbal, that are used when communicating with others. These non-verbal skills are important within social interactions to allow for appropriate communication to occur. Some pragmatic skills include:

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• Eye contact

• Turn taking

• Topic skills (initiation, maintenance, closure)

• Appropriate humour

• Facial expressions

• Body language 

• Intonation in voice