Communication, Language, and Speech Disorder by Christina

Communication impairment- Significantly limited, impaired, or delayed capacity to use expressive and/or receptive language, exhibited by difficulties in one or more of the following areas: speech, such as articulation and/or voice, conveying, understanding, or using spoken, written, or symbolic language.

Characteristics:

This disorder is broken up into three different categories:

• Communication- is the exchange of thoughts, information, feelings, and ideas, and it requires three things: a sender, a message, and a receiver. It is important to note that communication happens when all of three of these are working all three need to be present for communication to happen Communication problems emerge when there are difficulties with any one of these elements.

Communication disorders disrupt the individuals ability to send, receive, and process information.

• Language- There are two kinda a language that are involved in communication. There is receptive and expressive language. Receptive involves being able to take the message and understand it. Expressive language is the ability to produce a message to send, this typically involves speaking and writing.
  

Each element of language - phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics- is a potential source of a language disorder.

• Speech- is the systematic oral production of the words of a given language. Sounds become speech only when they produce words that have meaning. We think of normal speech as a combination of articulation, fluency, and voice.

Speech disorders may include problems with articulation and phonological processing, fluency, and or voice.

Many of the other disabilities that we talk about in other chapters lead to communication disorders. Some of these include:

• Intellectual and Developmental Delays
• Cerebral Palsy
• Learning Disabilities
• Severe and Profound Multiple Disabilities
• Autism
• Deaf/ Hearing Impaired
• Visual Impairments
• Emotional and Behavioral Problems
  

How children with communication disorder differ:

Communication is central to our ability to fit into society successfully, and when difficulties with language and or speech interfere with communication, children often experience problems. These problems can affect the formation of a child's friendships, school success, and self-esteem. As a society we rely on being able to communicate with other people on a daily basis in order to get from day to day. Not being able to have this communication will drastically affect a child's life.


Assistive Technology:





Communication boards vary in complexity from a board with simple pictures to sophisticated groups of letters, words, pictures and special symbols. The use of these aids has been shown to assist the child in acquiring language many times without speech, but not always. This is an example of unaided communication system



Aided communication systems provide some type of voice output and so can be used in a variety of situations. Speech synthesis is a text-to-speech technology that allows a person to type a message into a computer, which turns that written message into speech. Although the quality of the synthetic voice may not be high, this technology allows an individual who has no speech to "talk" which others.



Another unaided communication device would be American Sign Language.

Organizations:

National Instituate on deafness and other communications disorders.

Support groups this website not only give support groups for parents and children who suffer with communication disorders it give links to websites that have foundations and online talk forums for children and parents who have communication impairments.



Kirk S. , Gallagher J.J. , Coleman M.R. , & Anastasiow N. (2009). Educating Exceptional Children (12th ed. , pp.219-249). Boston, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company.