Dysarthria
What is Dysarthria?
Dysarthria is a disorder of speech. Speech means talking aloud. It involves a highly complex set of movements in the mouth and throat, and well controlled breath support.
Dysarthria can happen when nerves are damaged and the lips, tongue, roof of the mouth, voice box or breathing muscles are not working properly.
Why does it happen?
Dysarthria can happen if there is damage to the muscles used for speaking. It can be caused by stroke, head injury or other neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and motor neurone disease.
Symptoms
Dysarthric speech can be difficult to understand, and may sound slurred, quiet, soft, hoarse, strained, mumbly, too slow, too fast, monotone, jerky or unsteady. Dysarthria does not affect your hearing, understanding or intelligence. Common problems It may be difficult to talk to friends or family, take your turn in a conversation or use the telephone. It may feel easier to take a backseat and let others do the talking, or avoid talking to new people or in large groups. Tiredness, stress or hurrying will often make communication more difficult.
Tips
These tips may help to make your speech clearer:
- Take deeper breaths or extra ‘top up’ breaths
- Keep sentences short
- Speak louder than feels natural (as if in a large room)
- Put extra effort into stressing key words
- Slow down
- Exaggerate your mouth movements
- Leave a clear space between each word
Ideas to get your message across:
- Try to get your message across in another way, for example, write it down, draw it, gesture, facial expression
- Be aware of signs that the listener is not understanding, for example, nodding inappropriately, or changing the subject
- Attract the listener’s attention (for example, by touch or calling their name) before you begin talking to them
- Repeat what you said using techniques to make your speech clearer
Ways to make it easier
It will be more difficult for the person with dysarthria, and the person listening, if there are lots of competing noises or distractions.
Everyone can help to make things easier by:
- Reducing background noise: Switch off the TV or radio
- Make sure you are face to face: Make eye contact, look at the speaker’s mouth
- Limit your distance: Make sure you are in the same room when talking
- Avoid long conversations if you are feeling tired
How can speech and language therapy help?
Your speech and language therapist can take a close look at your speech. We can assess how the speech muscles are working and suggest useful ways to help you communicate. We may give you exercises to improve the clarity of your speech or help the muscles recover.
Advice for family, friends and carers
Trying to communicate with someone with dysarthria can feel frustrating, upsetting, tiring or embarrassing.
You can help by:
- paying full attention
- showing that you’re listening, by making eye contact, stopping other activities and non verbal cues, for example, nodding
- being patient, letting the speaker finish what they are saying and not interrupting
- giving feedback, I did understand, or I didn’t understand, or I understood the first bit but not the end (don’t make them repeat the whole thing unnecessarily)
- not pretending to understand if you have not
- prompting them to slow down, speak louder, over articulate and write it down (depending on what helps)
- asking closed questions to determine the context (for example, are you talking about the appointment?)
See our dysarthria self management sheet.
