Speech therapy

Speech therapy is a health profession that falls within the family of care professions.

• It consists of preventing, evaluating and treating difficulties or disorders: of oral and written language and communication,
• oro-myo-facial functions,
• other cognitive activities including those related to phonation, speech, oral and written language, mathematical cognition.

It also consists of:

• to maintain the functions of communication and orality in degenerative and neuro-degenerative pathologies,
• Speech therapyand to teach other forms of non-verbal communication to complement or supplement verbal functions.

Speech therapy focuses on the plural dimensions of the concept of language, as a means of expression, interaction and access to symbolization in all its dimensions, in particular:

• linguistic dimensions: preverbal, articulatory, phonological, prosodic, lexico-semantic, morphosyntactic, but also discursive and pragmatic skills, particularly in the statement/enunciation distinction, etc.
• cognitive dimensions dependent on memory functions, executive functions, reasoning, attentional resources and social cognitions,
• psycho-affective dimensions: language as an organizer of thought and psyche,
• social dimensions: language as a vector of socialization and a marker of cultural identity.

Speech therapy is also interested in all the alterations of the oro-facial sphere on the motor, sensory and physiological levels, which covers the alterations of phonemes, the lingual dysfunctions, the disorders of the respiratory modes, the dysphagia, the disorders observed in facial paralysis and dysfunctions of the masticatory apparatus.