Henry Cardamon, age 14, of Birmingham, Ala., for his question:
DO MANY PEOPLE NEED SPEECH THERAPY?
Speech thearpy is the treatment of speech problems and disorders. About six percent of the people in the United States and Canada have some kind of speech defect, and therefore should have speech therapy.
Some speech defects result from a physcial condition, such as brain damage, cleft palate, a disease of the larynx or partial or complete deafness. other speech defects may be caused by a person’s environment. A child who receives little encouragement to talk at home, for example, may not develop normal speech skills.
Severe emotional conflicts, such as pressure to succeed or lack of love, can also lead to speech difficulties.
Speech therapy didn’t become a profession until the early 1900s. During the 1920s, schools for training speech therapists opened in medical schools in several European counties. In the United States, speech therapy became closely allied with the fields of education, psychology and speech.
Speech therapists work with children and adults whose speech interferes with communication, calls attention to itself and frustrates both speaker and listener. These specialists evaluate and correct defective speech and teach new speech skills.
Speech therapists divide speech defects into five main types: articulation problems, such as the inability to produce certain sounds; stuttering, cluttering (rapid, slurred speech) and other fluency problems; voice disorders; delayed speech; and aphasia.
Aphasia is the partial or total loss of the ability to speak or understand language. Voice disorders can include problems of pitch, voice quality and volume. Delayed speech is characterized by a childs’s slow language development.
Speech therapy may be given individually or in groups. The therapist puts patients in groups if he thinks that contact with people who have similar defects will bring rapid improvement.
Many people feel more at home and less self conscious in a group than when alone with a therapist. They also receive encouragement by listening to others and by hearing the improvement of members of the group.
Most patients with complex speech problems, such as aphasia, receive individual therapy. Speech specialists feel that individual attention in such cases achieves faster results than does group therapy.
Some patients attend both kinds of sessions.
The method of treatment varies from case to case. The speech therapist must consider the age of the patient, his case history, the type of speech disorder and the information gained about the patient during therapy.
Most children develop speech habits until about the age of eight. Thus, when working with a young patient, the therapist uses methods that help stimulate the development of good speech habits. With an older patient, the therapist must use corrective measures.
Many therapists use audio and video recording machines.