Abstract

Motor speech disorders are a common accompaniment of a whole range of neurological conditions, from stroke, brain injury and Parkinson’s disease through to many rarer conditions. This book aims to aid understanding of the nature of motor speech disorders from a cross-language perspective, in contrast to the largely English-centric nature of research and practice recommendations to date. The book looks not just at how these motor speech disorders are assessed and treated in other countries, but also examines how underlying speech impairments differ according to the language someone speaks. The book studies the underlying neurological, neurophysiological and neurophonetic characteristics of motor speech disorders in different language contexts, and discusses the implications these have for clinical rehabilitation. This significantly adds to debates around the theoretical understanding and clinical management of motor speech disorders.

The real goal of speech motor control is communication, so to understand motor speech disorders we have to study them in context – in the full diversity of human languages in which they arise. This ground-breaking, engaging book will foster identification of universal and language-specific symptoms of motor speech disorders, and stimulate research on their assessment and treatment.

Nick Miller is Professor of Motor Speech Disorders at Newcastle University, UK. His main research interests include apraxia, dysarthria and dysphagia and the psychosocial impact of neurogenic communication disorders.

Anja Lowit is Reader in Speech and Language Therapy at Strathclyde University, UK. Her research interests include dysarthria, prosodic disorders, acoustic analysis of disordered speech, treatment effectiveness and the development of outcome measures.

This text will surely become regarded as a seminal text in the area of Motor Speech Disorders (MSDs). Despite the clear emphasis on providing cross-language insights, the researcher or clinician whose work is very much grounded in English-speakers would stand to benefit hugely from reviewing the opening chapters to gain new insight and direction into linguistic approaches to the description, diagnosis and treatment of MSDs.

This is a ground-breaking seminal work which assesses the state of knowledge in a wide variety of languages, lays the theoretical foundations for future research and is a much-needed complement to research in aphasia. It greatly enriches our understanding of the representation and organization of speech and language in the human brain.

This is a fascinating, well-written and informative book...Reading this has left me energised, enthusiastic and excited about the potential in this area. The authors highlight that further research is essential across many languages. This will be exciting and innovative, so watch this space.