Definition
Dysarthria is a group of motor speech disorders resulting from disturbed muscular control of the speech mechanism due to the damage of the peripheral or central nervous system causing weakness, incoordination, or paralysis of speech musculature. Physiologic characteristics include abnormal or disturbed strength, speed, range, steadiness, tone, and accuracy of muscle movements. The underlying problem is one that affects all movements of the affected muscles. Therefore, disorders of feeding and swallowing often co-occur with the speech disorder. Dysarthria can cause significantly reduced speech intelligibility due to disturbed pitch, loudness, voice quality, resonance, respiratory support for speech, prosody, and articulation.
Categorization
The features of the dysarthria take different forms depending on the level of neurologic impairment or the different types of neurologic dysfunction. An experienced speech-language pathologist can distinguish varieties of dysarthria that...
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References and Readings
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Roth, C.R., Nip, I. (2018). Dysarthria. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_880
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_880
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