A significant part of one's life is dedicated to communicating with others or in understanding how to do so. An impairment in this ability has dire consequences on the quality of life.
Cerebral palsy is a neurological disorder caused by a non-progressive brain injury or malformation that occurs while the child’s brain is under development which primarily affects body movement and muscle coordination. There are also dire effects on communication skills which might add to the difficulty in their daily lives. Problems in communication, especially poor speech production, may be a direct result of the motor impairment due to a disturbed neuromuscular control of speech mechanism, i.e. dysarthria (Crary, 1995).The more severe the CP is, the less able the children are to speak and to be understood by family members. Cerebral palsy often affects the language centres of the brain that control speech. In mild cases of cerebral palsy, a child may have difficulty using the correct words, but in more severe cases, a child’s ability to verbally express himself or herself might be seriously impeded. Under these circumstances, a speech and language pathologist will …show more content…
Firstly, we were aware that there was not much focus on SLT for CP but it was quite surprising to see the low numbers of papers that focused on this topic and interestingly enough, most of the papers that were present were demographically limited, as most of them were from the United Kingdom. It is then, of utmost essence to create awareness among the scientific community and the public in order to push for the need of more work to be done on the topic. More initiatives like World CP Day should be initiated, which would give everyone a chance to clear out the myths associated with