What is speech therapy?

What Does speech therapy Mean

The speech therapy , known in Latin America as audiology , is the set of methods for teaching a normal phonation who have difficulties in pronunciation .

It is the science that evaluates, diagnoses, and treats language, voice, and swallowing problems. Its purpose is the prevention, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and comprehensive evaluation of human communication disorders , whether they belong to the field of speech or language .
Speech therapy even takes care of orofacial problems , through myofunctional therapy. In some countries , there is the figure of the hearing and language teacher, a professional who can be confused with the speech therapist when carrying out similar work within the educational framework.

Speech therapy, for example, may be responsible for the treatment of aphasia , which is the loss or disorder of the ability to speak due to an injury to the language areas of the cerebral cortex. This dysfunction makes it impossible or diminished the ability to communicate through oral language, writing or signs.
The dysphasia , an anomaly in the language, it is assumed, is caused by brain injury, it can also be treated by the SLP. Dysphasia is usually named as specific language disorder (SLI) or specific language development disorder (PDDL) and is defined by exclusion, since it names the onset or delayed development of language that cannot be attributed to a sensory deficit, mental deficiency, psychopathological disorder, socio-affective deprivation or obvious brain injury.
As with professionals in other fields, speech therapists can exercise their activity individually or in groups, forming teams made up of people from different fields. In addition, this can take place in the private or public sector, good news for people who cannot afford to pay for a social work every month but need the help of these specialists.
In more precise terms, we can find speech therapy professionals in the health, educational and social care fields, among others. The first is the broadest, since it encompasses the following spaces: health centers , hospitals, hearing aid centers, intensive care units, day hospitals, comatose units and early care centers.
It is correct to affirm that the speech therapist offers services of a clinical nature, since they consist of preventing, planning, assessing, documenting and treating specific cases, offering advice and collaboration with other professionals from complementary fields to integrate various techniques into the processes .

Regarding the educational field, speech therapy can be part of psychopedagogy teams in schools of all levels and universities, both public and private, to offer advice to teachers and students. It is important to highlight that the problems that these professionals attend to are not exclusive to children, but can arise in people of all ages, for various reasons; so much so that they even act in some geriatric residences.
Two other areas in which speech therapy also appears, although less frequently, are the media, in programs of general interest where they provide advisory services to the audience, and penitentiary institutions, as part of the assistance that the people while they are serving their sentences.
From the moment we are born, the development of the so-called prelinguistic stage begins , that is, the one that covers everything that occurs before learning to speak. Throughout the first year of life we ​​receive a large volume of linguistic stimuli that we gradually internalize, through processes that help us filter the relevant sounds, those that are part of the language spoken by our tutors.

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