Adults Speech Therapy Services

In contrast with speech therapy for children, speech therapy for adults has a number of key differences. And that goes beyond adults generally being a little more cooperative than kids when it comes to sessions.

In some cases, your speech therapy for adults might revolve around something you’ve had since you were a kid. This is the case with articulation disorders, like stutters or lisps. When treating kids with these conditions, we can often significantly reduce them or even effectively eliminate them altogether. This is because a young child’s brain isn’t fully developed yet, so there’s time to catch these and form new habits when a child is in their formative years.

This is why speech therapists push the idea of early intervention so much – the earlier we work with a child, the better their chances are of overcoming their disorder.

With a fully developed adult brain, however, this becomes more difficult. Rather than focus on eliminating your disorder, we may focus more on developing strategies to better manage it. This may include techniques to reduce the impact of your disorder, as well as to manage the social anxiety that can come along with it.

In other cases, you may be seeking speech therapy for an acquired condition, like apraxia of speech or aphasia as a result of a stroke, traumatic brain injury, or other catastrophic event. In these cases, speech therapy for adults will focus on allowing you to regain your ability to speak, communicate, and understand others as much as possible. It will also focus on developing alternative methods to accomplish these tasks where necessary.

Read on below to find out more about some of the individual conditions speech therapy for adults can help with.

In the past, this was called “speech therapy treatments for accent reduction,” but the way we think about accents has changed.

This is because everybody who speaks any language at all has an accent. This is true of people who learn English as a second language, but it’s also true of native English speakers. If you don’t think this is true, listen to a Texan and a Minnesotan speak. One doesn’t have “more” of an accent than the other, they just speak differently. So “accent reduction” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

At the same time, it’s a reality that some people have accents that others find difficult to understand. If you learned English later in life, for example, it can be difficult to make sense of how you speak in your native tongue and how you now speak in English. This is where speech therapy treatments for accent modification come in.

If you have difficulty being understood by others in your community, speech therapy can help. We’ll find out what parts of your speech are causing difficulty, and work with you to modify them. The result is clearer speech that locals will be better able to understand.

There’s nothing wrong with having a foreign accent. But if it’s causing issues in your life, Sol Speech & Language Therapy can help.

Aphasia is a condition that can affect your ability to understand others, and be understood by them.

It’s generally caused by traumatic brain injury or stroke, but it can also be caused by brain cancer, brain infections, degenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, and other injuries to your brain.

Because the causes of aphasia can be such life altering events, each case tends to be different. Some cases of aphasia may be fairly mild, while others can almost completely destroy your ability to communicate. As a result, speech therapy treatments for aphasia can differ greatly from person to person.

Symptoms of aphasia include:

• Difficulty recalling words
• Mixing up the order of words
• Speaking in single words or short fragments
• Using made up words
• Difficulty understanding others
• Difficulty writing
• Difficulty reading
• Difficulty sounding out words

In milder cases, you may be able to completely regain your speech and language skills, but it’s common to require an alternate form of communication.

Here at Sol Speech & Language Therapy, we have the knowledge and skills to help.

If you believe you or a loved one is suffering from aphasia, we can screen, assess, and diagnose the condition. From there, we’ll work with you or your loved one to regain communication abilities.

Aphasia can be a difficult condition, but a speech therapist from Sol Speech & Language Therapy can help.

Apraxia of speech is a motor speech disorder that affects your brain’s ability to communicate with the muscles you use to make speech sounds. It’s more common in children, and with the greater spread of speech therapy treatments, more children are being treated for this condition at a younger age.

However, adult apraxia of speech is a little different. In some cases, it may be childhood apraxia of speech that was never treated, but it’s more often the result of a stroke or traumatic brain injury.

If you have apraxia of speech, it may cause you to have difficulty creating certain sounds. You may also end up creating the wrong sounds, despite knowing exactly what you mean to say.

Symptoms of apraxia of speech include:

• Difficulty making sounds
• Difficulty imitating others’ sounds
• Adding unnecessary sounds to words
• Leaving sounds out of words
• Having inconsistent pronunciation
• Slower speech
• Not being able to make any sounds at all

Speech therapy treatments for adult acquired apraxia of speech are geared toward helping you improve your ability to understand others and be understood. Your speech therapist will work with you to retrain your muscles to move correctly and create the sounds you’re struggling with.

In some cases, your speech therapist may work with you to provide alternate methods of communication.

Communication is one of the central facets of human life, and acquired apraxia of speech can feel like that’s been taken away from you. But there is help.

Contact Sol Speech & Language Therapy today.

Cluttering in adults is similar to stuttering in adults in that both are fluency disorders. However, there are significant differences between the two as well.

Cluttering disorder is a disorder where your speech sounds unclear and disorganized. It tends to be far faster than most speak. The best explanation for cluttering is that those who clutter are speaking at a rate that’s faster than their system can handle, leading to the clutters.

Cluttering can take many different forms.

In some cases, it can lead to syllables blending together, to the point where a word may sound like some syllables are missing altogether. For example, they might take the word “adventurously,” and pronounce it more like “venchis’ly.”

Clutterers might also use a lot of interjections, like ums and uhs, or restart a sentence halfway through with a revision.

Finally, clutterers commonly add pauses in their speech in unexpected places, which can cause them to sound jerky.

In general, cluttering is nothing to worry about unless it presents issues with communicating. If it does, however, speech therapy can help.

Speech therapy treatments for cluttering will focus on the areas where your communication is the biggest issue. This may involve helping you slow your speech down, but it can also include learning where to place pauses to sound more natural, as well as how to create words with their full syllables.

If you’ve been told you speak too quickly to the point that others find it difficult to understand you, you may have a cluttering disorder. Contact Sol Speech & Language Therapy to find out how we can help.

Speech therapy can help with a variety of other disorders as well, including:

• Dysarthria
• Articulation disorders
• Cognitive communication deficits
• Expressive disorders
• Resonance disorders
• Receptive disorders

Broadly speaking, speech therapy can help with most speech & language related issues.