Understanding Students with Communication Disorders

Chapter 6

What is communication?

• Receiving information• Understanding information• Expressing information• Expressing feelings• Expressing ideas

Speech Language Disorders

• Speech disorder• Language disorder• Receptive language disorder• Expressive language disorder

Cultural Diversity in Communication

• Cooperative group activities and role-playing

• Highlight the value of cultural diversity: contributions of events, celebrations, and people

• Guest speakers from differing cultures

• Parental involvement

Incidence

• 18.8% ages 6-21 get speech/language service

• 55% children ages 3-5 served under IDEA for speech/language

• Most children spend majority of their day in general education

Typical Speech Development

• Person pushes air from lungs• Muscles in larynx move vocal folds

producing sound• Larynx sits on top of the trachea and

contains the vocal folds where voice is produced

• Person forms sounds by varying the position of lips, tongue, and lower jaw

Language

• Phonology • Morphology• Syntax• Semantics• Pragmatics

How it all fitsFunctionalist Language Theory

Pragmatics

Syntax

Semantics

Phonology• Use of sounds to make meaningful

syllables and words• Encompasses the rules and sequencing of

individual speech sounds (phonemes)• Study and use of individual sound units in a

language and the rules by which they are combined and recombined to create larger language units.

• Phonemes are the unit of sound such as /s/ or /b/ , they do not convey meaning.

• Phonemes alter meaning of words when combined (e.g., sat to bat).

Phonological Deficits

• Frequently appear as articulation disorders.– Child omits a consonant: “oo” for you– Child substitutes one consonant:

“wabbit” for rabbit– Discrimination: child hears “go get the

nail” instead of mail

What is a Phoneme?

• Different linguistic units: large to small

• The smallest unit of sound in our language that makes a difference to its meaning.– Dog /d/ /o/ /g/– Sun /s/ /u/ /n/– Man /m/ /a/ /n/

What is Morphology?

• The system that governs the structure of words

• The smallest meaningful unit of speech is called a morpheme

• Adds plurals, inflection, affixes, and past tense markers to verbs

• For example: changes “swim” to “swam”

Syntax

• Study of the rules by which words are organized into phrases or sentences in a particular language.

• Referred to as the grammar of the language and allows for more complex expression of thoughts and ideas by making references to past and future events.

Syntactic Deficits

• Lack the length or syntactic complexity (e.g., “Where Daddy go?”).

• Problems comprehending sentences that express relationship between direct or indirect objects.

• Difficulty with wh questions.

Semantics

• The larger meaning component of language.

• More than single words, includes complex use of vocabulary, including structures such as word categories, word relationships, synonyms, antonyms, figurative language, ambiguities, and absurdities.

Semantic Deficits

• Limited vocabulary especially in adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, or pronouns.

• Longer response time in selecting vocabulary words.

• Fail to perceive subtle changes in word meaning: incomplete understanding and misinterpretations.

• Figurative language problems.

Pragmatics

• Knowledge and ability to use language functionally in social or interactive situations.

• Integrates all the other language skills, but also requires knowledge and use of rule governing the use of language in social context.

Pragmatic Deficits

• Problems understanding indirect requests (e.g., may say yes when asked “Must you play the piano?”).

• May enter conversations in a socially unacceptable fashion or fail to take turns talking.

• Difficulty staying on topic.

Social Interaction Theories

• Communication skills are learned through social interactions

• Language development is the outcome of a child’s drive for attachment with his or her world

• Vygotsky: children learn by doing with more experienced partners (guided learning)

Language Development

• Within first month - respond to human voices

• 3 months - turn, smile, and coo• 12 months - make sounds when

spoken to, vary pitch and intensity, and experiment with rhythm, may say first words

• 12-24 months - vocabularies increase to 200-300 words

Language Development Cont.

• 3 year olds - understand simple questions and prepositions (in, on, under) and follow 2-step directions, have vocabulary of 900-1,000 words

• Preschoolers - ask W (5) and H questions and have vocabularies of 1,500-1,600 words

• Age 6 - use irregular verbs “be,” “go”, “run” and “swim” and have vocabularies of 2,600 words

Speech Disorders

• Articulation disorder– Substitutions– Omissions– Additions– Distortions

• Apraxia of speech

Voice Disorders

• Pitch• Duration• Intensity• Resonance

– Hyponasality– Hypernasality

Fluency Disorders

• Interruptions in the flow of speaking– Hesitate– Repeat themselves– Use fillers such as “umm”– Stuttering

Organic Causes• Nervous system• Muscular system• Chromosomes• Formation of speech mechanism• Hereditary malformation• Prenatal injuries• Toxic disturbances• Tumors• Traumas• Seizures, Infections diseases• Muscular diseases• Vascular impairments

Functional Disorders

• Present when the cause of the impairment is unknown - no physical cause

Collaboration with Teachers

• Supportive teaching• Complementary teaching• Consultation• Team teaching

Augmentative and Alternative Communication

• Integrated groups of components that supplement the communication abilities of individuals who cannot communicate effectively through gestures, speaking, and/or writing

AAC Devices• A symbol set

– Gestures– Photographs– Manual sign sets/systems– Pictographs (symbols that look like what they

represent)– Ideographs (more abstract symbols) – Printed words– Objects– Partial objects– Miniature objects– Spoken words– Braille

• A means for selecting the symbols

Activity

• Get into your group• Read over Box 6-3• Answer questions 1-4