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Archive for October, 2008


Speech Therapy Voice Training For The Laryngectomee

Voice training is done to find an appropriate source of sound production that can be articulated for communication purposes. Criteria for selecting sound source include: degree of tissue loss, esophageal stenosis, physical limitations of the patient; noise level of the patient’s environment; motivation level; and patient’s preference of sound source.

Types Of Sound Source

There are mainly three types of sound source a patient can choose from. These are: external man-made prosthesis or artificial larynx; sphincter like junction of the pharynx and esophagus or esophageal speech; and lastly, surgically implanted device or transesophageal puncture and silicon prosthesis.

Artificial Larynx

The principle of artificial larynx is to have an external mechanical sound source that is substituted for the larynx. Anatomic structures for articulation and resonance are most of the time unaltered.

There are two general types of electrolarynges that are available: neck type and intra oral type. The neck type is placed flush to the skin on the side of the neck, under the chin, or on the cheek. Sound is conducted via the oropharynx and is articulated normally.

The intraoral type is used for patients that can’t conduct sound through skin adequately. A small tube is placed toward the
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Speech Therapy Of Hearing Impaired Children at the Verbal Level

There are two notable differences when teaching a hearing-impaired child compared to the traditional way of teaching language. First the choice of vocabulary taught is different. Second, the correctness of word order is different too.

Teaching at the Vocabulary or One Word Level

First, your choice of vocabulary is important. Customarily, words that are easy to say or lip read are usually taught first. Words like shoe, bow, tie, boot etc. are commonly taught with an emphasis on lip reading. On the other hand, children taught through auditory stimulation would likely say button first rather than bow. This is due to the inflectional pattern of button that is more stimulating to the child’s hearing.

Then there is the use for functional words. Auditory approach makes the early vocabulary of functional words possible. Words that a child uses to communicate everyday experiences but are very far off from the words said in the vocabulary lists devised for deaf children. Much of these words are not proper names or nouns.

Some of the first words are: Bye-bye, More, Oh, All gone, Off, Nice, Rough, Up, Uh-huh, Down, Hi, Ow, Hot, Cold, Light, No, Yummy, Yah, Pooie, Peeoo, Stop, Cut and Knock-knock.


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Speech Therapy Management For Fluency Disorders

There are six main types of fluency disorders namely: normal developmental disfluency, stuttering, neurogenic disfluency, psychogenic disfluency, language based disfluency, and mixed fluency failures. Due to the uniqueness and difference of each case, all of them require a different kind of management approach in speech therapy.

Management For Normal Developmental Disfluency

Developmental disfluency occurs during the critical period of speech and language development. A child is considered to have this condition if 5% or less of his overall speech-sample are repetitions and 1% or less are prolongations.

Etiologies of this condition could be: excitement while speaking, demands of Language Acquisition, Speech-Motor control is lagging, environmental factors like stress in the family (e.g. separation of parents) and the situations they are in, and daily pressures of competition.

Concerned parents still make their children with this kind of disfluency undergo therapy even if this could still possibly decline. These children are taught how to: decrease the rate of their speech, relieve other pressures that the therapist and parents mutually agree to change, and simplify their language.

Management For Stuttering

The onset of stuttering may occur between ages 1 ½- 11 years old but it mostly occurs during early childhood stage, which
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