June is Aphasia Awareness Month. What is aphasia and can speech therapy help? Aphasia is a communication disorder, it typically interferes with the ability to understand or say words. It affects people differently.

Some may a difficult time speaking and finding the right words to express themselves.

Some may have a difficult time comprehending and reading written words.

While some may have trouble understanding conversations

Others may have issues with using numbers or writing words

According to the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA), “Aphasia is an acquired neurogenic language disorder resulting from an injury to the brain—most typically, the left hemisphere. Aphasia involves varying degrees of impairment in four primary areas: Spoken language expression, Spoken language comprehension, Written expression, Reading comprehension. A person with aphasia often has relatively intact nonlinguistic cognitive skills, such as memory and executive function, although these and other cognitive deficits may co-occur with aphasia.”

The National Aphasia Association estimates 2,000,000 Americans currently suffer from aphasia. If you know someone with aphasia, speech therapy can help.

There are a few different approaches for speech therapy for Aphasia 

Impairment Based Speech therapy for Aphasia

This type of approach promotes tasks to help one form sounds and words. This is done through exercises for the tongue and mouth as well as comprehension and speech. After an evaluation, the speech therapist will develop a plant that concentrate on specific areas of impairment, such as formulating sentence structure and retrieving verbs.

Compensatory based speech therapy for Aphasia 

Compensatory strategies are a way of learning different or new ways of completing a task. Focusing on alternative ways to convey feelings and communicating messages. A speech therapist will evaluate and create strategies to expand on existing language skills. For instance, if complex or longer sentences are an issue, working on key words or shorter sentences, to express thoughts.

To learn more about how a speech therapist can help you or a loved one, contact First Words Speech Therapy.