Guy Owen, age 16, of Baltimore, Md., for his question:
DO MANY PEOPLE HAVE SPEECH DEFECTS?
Speech problems and disorders have been noted since ancient times. Today, medical experts report, about six percent of the people in the United States have some kind of speech defect.
Speech therapists divide speech defects into five main types: articulation problems, stuttering, voice disorders, delayed speech and aphasia.
Articulation problems include such things as the inability to produce certain sounds. Stuttering is also called cluttering. Rapid and slurred speech as well as other fluency problems must be faced here. Voice disorders include problems of pitch, voice quality and volume. Delayed speech is characterized by a child's slow language development. Aphasia is the partial or total loss of the ability to speak or understand language.
Some speech defects result from a physical 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 because he is unable to practice as he learns. Severe emotional conflicts, such as pressure to succeed or a lack of love, can also lead to speech difficulties.
In many schools, speech therapists test students regularly for speech disorders. If a student has a speech problem, he receives therapy at the school or goes to a speech clinic for treatment.
A speech therapist diagnoses the patient's speech problem and tries to learn its cause. He takes a detailed case history and gives the patient special speech and hearing tests. A patient may need medical or psychological treatment in addition to speech therapy.
The method of treatment varies from case to case.
Most children develop speech habits until about the age of 8. Thus, when working with a young patient, the therapist must use methods that help stimulate the development of good speech habits.
With an older patient, the therapist must use corrective measures.
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 persons feel more at home and less self conscious in a group than when alone with a therapist.
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.
People have had speech problems for more than 2,000 years. Little progress in the treatment of speech defects, however, occured until the 1700s.During the 1700s, speech therapists worked mostly with the deaf. The 1800s brought much research into the causes and treatment of speech problems.
Speech therapy didn't become a profession until the early 1900s. And it wasn't until the 1920s when special schools and colleges offered training in this important field.