Week One

Question 1

What are the steps involved in the process of speaking?

Answer 1

1. Cognitive linguistic processing
   - You need to formulate the message
   - Involves both semantic processing (dog = furry, tail, barks, pet) and phonological processing (phonemes, syllables)
2. Sensorimotor planning
   Motor plan for the message
   - The motor cortex plans how all the muscles of articulation will need to move

Sensory Feedback
- Self monitoring: both auditory and somatosensory. Allows for error detection

3. Neuromuscular execution
   - Executing the motor plan and moving the muscles

However, throughout there is the involvement of control circuits: basal ganglia and cerebellum. This ensures speech movements are well timed, durationally appropriate and fluent.

Question 2

What are the components/subsystems of speech?

Answer 2

• Respiration
• Phonation
• Articulation
• Resonance

Question 3

What is the role of the cerebellum and basal ganglia in speech?

Answer 3

Cerebellum
- Involved in coordinating and timing movements

Basal Ganglia
- Involved in the initiation and inhibition of movements

Question 4

What disorder occurs at the stage of cognitive linguistic processing?

Answer 4

Aphasia

Question 5

What disorder occurs at the stage of sensorimotor planning?

Answer 5

Apraxia of speech

Question 6

What disorder occurs at the stage of neuromuscular execution?

Answer 6

Dysarthria

Question 7

What are motor speech disorders?

Answer 7

They are speech disorders resulting from neurologic impairment affecting the motor planning, neuromuscular control, or execution of speech.
-Duffy, 2013

Question 8

What are some characteristics of apraxia of speech?

Answer 8

Difficulty at the stage of motor planning

Articulation and prosody difficulties
- Consonant and vowel errors
- Slow rate

May struggle to correctly position articulators correctly
- Visible groping (searching for sounds)

People generally aware of mistakes and attempt to correct

Question 9

What are some characteristics of dysarthria?

Answer 9

Difficulty at the stage of motor execution
- maybe due to muscle weakness, paralysis, incoordination

Symptoms depend on location of damage

Different subtypes (as classified in the Mayo system):
- Flaccid
- Spastic
- Ataxic
- Hypo-kinetic
- Hyper-kinetic

Question 10

Some strengths and weaknesses of the Mayo system?

Answer 10

Strengths
- Helps to determine speaker’s underlying neurological deficits

Weakness
- Many overlapping symptoms across subtypes
- Doesn’t inform about severity or how to treat

• Therefore ICF framework needs to be considered

Question 11

What are the three main ways to assess speech movement?

Answer 11

1. Perceptual - listening and hearing speech features. Most common in practise. Paragraph reading (grandfather passage).
2. Physiological - looking at the movement of the articulators
3. Acoustic - measuring acoustic signal