Essentials Of Communication Disorders: Challenges In Communication

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The ability to communicate is a basic human need. According to Fogle (2013), in the book “Essentials of Communication Disorders”, communication is “any means by which individuals relate their wants, needs, thoughts, knowledge, and feelings to another person”. Communication occurs through various modalities, which influence the capability to communicate with each other. They include verbal, non-verbal and paralinguistic processes. However, some people experience difficulties in communication and as a result, they cannot convey or receive verbal messages properly and with ease. Some of the causes include impairment of the physiological systems, psychological or mental disorders or delayed language development. The challenges in communication are referred to as communication disorders defined by American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA) as “any impairment in the ability to receive, send, process, and comprehend concepts or verbal, nonverbal and graphic symbol systems”. ASHA classifies the disorders into language disorders, speech disorders, and hearing …show more content…
Children with difficulties in narration are not only at risk of not developing socially but also linguistically and academically. The underlying need to be able to narrate is due to the extensive language properties involved in the process including conversational structures, artistic expressions and mundane and informal tales (Ochs & Capps, 2001). Children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) have been found to have difficulties in developing narrative skills. As studied by Soto & Hartmann (2006) the difficulties range from lack of coherence and poor organization of narratives. Besides illogical organization, children with AAC were found to have poor vocabulary application and sentence structures. Soto & Hartmann identified deficiencies in use of linguistic verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns and elaborated noun