Dyslalia is a speech disability that makes it difficult to pronounce words correctly. It can be caused by speech organ defects, hearing loss, or learning disabilities. Treatment includes surgery or ongoing therapy sessions.
Dyslalia is a type of speech disability in which sufferers have significant difficulty pronouncing words correctly and articulating their speech clearly. Some people with this disorder have trouble speaking only certain sounds, while others have trouble speaking in general. This condition does not usually result from neurological problems, and in many cases doctors trace it to specific speech organ defects. Some other causes of dyslalia include hearing loss and some learning disabilities. The disorder usually appears in young children when they first reach the average age at which they begin to speak.
When a child first has significant difficulty speaking, a doctor will usually first examine the overall structure of the tongue. Common causes of dyslalia can be traced to improper formation of the ligament that attaches the tongue to the back of the mouth. When this ligament is too short, proper movement of the tongue can be more problematic than normal. While the exact cause of this ligament malformation is unknown, it can usually be corrected through relatively simple surgery. Most doctors recommend that this procedure be done as early as possible in young patients with dyslalia to allow them to more easily develop clear language habits after the surgery.
Congenital deafness is another cause of dyslalia, and problems associated with speaking result from the inability to understand other people’s correct speech. The severity of the problem is normally closely related to the degree of existing hearing loss. Some people with partial deafness can hear sounds only in limited high or low frequencies; this condition sometimes makes certain sounds seem indistinguishable to them. Many people with mild to moderate hearing-related dyslalia have difficulty distinguishing the differences between the “f”, “s”, or “th” sounds in various words.
Dyslalia can sometimes be a feature of a specific learning disability that affects speech articulation. This type of disability involves difficulty learning how to mentally process and verbally recreate spoken sounds. Another type of learning problem that can lead to dyslalia is known as phonemic impairment in which a sufferer has difficulty distinguishing between different sounds and selecting the right one to use for a given word. Treatments for these types of language-related learning disabilities usually include ongoing therapy sessions. The goal of this type of speech therapy is usually to help sufferers learn alternative ways to train their brains to correctly recognize, process, and articulate the appropriate parts of words.
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