How/why do speech impediments happen?
In: Biology
Oooh what a great question. The unsatisfactory answer is that you could do a 2 year undergraduate program and 2 year master’s degree program in speech-language pathology and still not have a clear simple answer to that question. Often times we don’t know a precise answer, though every once in awhile we do. Let me break it down a little.
For a child in the US between the ages of 3-21 (I have no clue how disability services work in any other country), there are 4 distinct areas in which they can qualify for a communication disorder. Each area has its set of potential causes.
The first area is a voice disorder. This can happen for a number of reasons but the main common factor is that there is damage to the vocal folds, sometimes temporary sometimes permanent. The 2 most common reasons this happens is from intubation in an emergency situation. When it come down to it sometimes breathing is more important in the moment than tissue damage. Or vocal nodules. Adele is a great example of this. She sings in a horse voice that is thought of as “sexy” but requires a great deal of strain on your vocal folds. She is lucky that her nodules were removed without permanently damaging her voice, but since she’s still singing the same way post surgery long term results aren’t encouraging. In kids we sometimes see this from lots of yelling, sometimes in conjunction with things like severe allergies that dry out your throat.
The second area of eligibility is fluency. The main disorder in this category is stuttering. There is no for sure 100% clear cause for stuttering but there are some trends we know. The first trend is that there seems to be a genetic component. About 75% of people who stutter have a close family member who stutters. Anxiety also often plays a part. There is a much higher likelihood that someone who stutters also has some sort of anxiety especially around speaking. A common misconception not to long ago was that parenting style caused stuttering, but this is not the case.
The last 2 areas of eligibilities are a child’s language skills, for example they’re ability to understand and form complex sentences, learn new words and form their ideas into sentences, and a child’s articulation/phonology, which is their ability to clearly articulate all the different speech sounds needed to speak and be understood. These areas are a bit more complex and muddy and 97% of the time there’s no clear cause. There are many factors that are known to contribute to a child’s delays though. One of the factors I see a lot in the population I work with is low socioeconomic status. If you have parents who are working multiple jobs super stressed out they don’t have as much time to read and talk to their kids. They also likely have a lower education themselves and probably use more simplistic language that doesn’t provide as rich of a language model. Kids who practice talking less that their peers don’t learn how to speak as quickly as their peers do. That’s not to say every poor kid is going to be delayed and rich white kids won’t be, it’s just an increased risk factor. Other times the area of the brain that develops speech and language just develops more slowly than others. There are also some other types of disorders in these areas that aren’t as common such as apraxia, which is a motor planning disorder that is easiest to think of as dyslexia of speaking. Your brain knows exactly what it wants to say, but as soon as your mouth tries to say it all the sounds end up jumbled up and in the wrong order. That’s another disorder that has some sort of disconnect between the area of the brain that creates the message and the area of the brain that controls the movements of the mouth.
There are many disorders that effect a child’s ability to communicate but for those, the delay in communication is secondary to another type of disorder for example a child with a hearing impairment has a hard time hearing others speak which makes it harder for them to imitate and learn correct speech patterns.
Latest Answers