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person with a speech disorder has trouble producing or pronouncing sounds in the correct or fluent manner. So, when a person is unable to produce speech sounds
correctly or fluently, or has problems with his or her voice, then he or she has a speech disorder. Difficulties pronouncing sounds, or articulation disorders, and
stuttering are examples of speech disorders www.asha.org.
2.2.2.3 Thought Disorder
Thought disorders are conditions that affect the way a person thinks, creating disturbance in the way a person puts together a logical consequence of
ideas. It is commonly recognized by incoherent or disorganized thinking. An individual suffering from a thought disorder may speak quickly and incessantly,
skip from one idea to the next, suffer from paranoia, delusions or hallucinations http:www.Mentalhealthcenter.org.
Maher 1972 proposed a model that attempted to demonstrate the link between thinking and the behaviour of speech in language. The model might be
likened to a typist copying from a script before her. Her copy may appear to be distorted because the script is distorted although the communication channel of
the typist’s eye and hand are functioning correctly. Alternatively, the original script may be perfect, but the typist may be unskilled, making typing errors in the
copy and thus distorting it. Finally, it is possible for an inefficient typist to add errors to an already incoherent script. Unfortunately, the psychopathologist can
observe only the copy language utterances: he cannot examine the script the thought. In general most theorists concerned with schizophrenic language have
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accepted the first of the three alternatives, namely that a good typist is transcribing a deviant script. The patient is correctly reporting a set of disordered thoughts. As
Critchley put it: ‘Any considerable aberration of thought or personality will be mirrored in the various levels of articulate speech – phonetic, phonemic, semantic,
syntactic and pragmatic’. The language is a mirror of the thought Oyebode, 2008: 175.
The script is likened to thought and the typist to language. Most clinicians have taken the view that language closely mirrors thought and see the primary
abnormality as the thinking disorder Beveridge, 1985. Disordered language is then seen as merely a reflection of this underlying disturbance, with diagnosis of
thought disorder only possible on the basis of what the patient says. Chaer 2009: 160 said that most of people represent their personality
through the language they used. Verbal expression is a representation of thought. Therefore, language is a representation of one’s thought. And he concluded that
impaired verbal expression as a result of an impaired thought. Language disorder due to thought disorder can be found in dementia, schizophrenia and depressive.
1 Dementia
Cummings 2014: 60 said that the dementias are a large and varied group of neuropathologies that lead eventually to the loss of cognitive and physical
functions in affected individuals. People with dementia may experience mild cognitive impairment initially which develops over time into mutism,
incontinence, immobility and dependence on others for all aspects of care.
