Multiple Sclerosis: Associated Speech and Language Disorders

Abstract

AbstractA sample of 23 Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients were administered a battery of tests in order to determine the type, frequency and severity of their speech and language problems. Deficits were found in all aspects of speech production, including respiration, phonation, prosody, articulation and resonance. Observed speech deviations were most often mild. The speech deviation which contributed the most to variations in overall intelligibility of speech was precision of consonant production. Impaired respiratory support for speech occurred in all subjects and was found to be highly associated with deviations in vocal quality, volume control and articulation.Subtests of the Neurosensory Centre Comprehensive Examination for Aphasia and the Wiig-Semel Test of Linguistic Concepts were administered to 20 patients. The majority of MS patients showed a severe deficit on the word fluency and sentence construction subtests. A dysfunction in the comprehension of logico-grammatical constructions was also evident in most cases. No aphasic syndrome was identified. It was concluded that language dysfunction in MS may be related to the presence of dementia.