Anomia is present and comprehension is affected by attention and memory deficits. As dementia progresses anomia and substitutions are more pronounced and patients have difficulty maintaining a topic, saying meaningless and unrelated phrases. Comprehension and memory become significantly impaired along with disorientation to time and place. Some useful tactics are getting eye-contact to make sure you have their attention, avoiding the use of pronouns, being redundant and only talking about one topic at a time, announcing topic changes, using illustrations or visual aids, using orientation and memory aids, and demonstrating instructions. All components of speech can be affected, while comprehension can be normal.
Dysarthritic speech can vary depending on the site of the lesion.
Flaccid dysarthria causes imprecise consonants, a breathy voice, hypernasality, and audible inhalation.1 Spastic dysarthria can cause slow, labored articulation, imprecise consonants, a strained voice quality, low and monotone pitch, and hypernasality.1 Ataxic dysarthria causes irregular articulation mistakes, imprecise consonants, distorted vowels, inconsistent control of nasality, volume, and pitch, excessive stressing of syllables, vocal tremor, and prolongation of sounds or the intervals between them. Therapists should encourage patients to communicate, along with speaking slowly, accentuating consonants and shortening phrase length. Therapists need to be patient when trying to understand dysarthritic speech. Another age related speech disorder is caused by a laryngectomy, usually performed to treat laryngeal cancer. The majority of these patients are male, with an average age of 62.1 Individuals must then communicate through writing, mouthing words, gesturing, and facial expressions.