Speech movement disorders

Speech movement disorders, as a consequence of nervous system impairment, are relatively common, being associated with numerous nervous system diseases, stroke, brain trauma, and congenital abnormalities. Disorders of speech movements may manifest as the only problem in communication or they may co-occur with impairments in language function. For this reason, and mostly as a matter of scientific and clinical convenience, speech and language typically are considered to be products of separate nervous system operations. In this distinction, speech can be viewed as the process whereby controlled movements are transformed into sound, or more abstractly, the movement-to-sound producing medium by which semantically significant messages are transmitted acoustically. By contrast, language is an organized system of consistent symbols that provides the meaning-based format for speech.