Speech

• Your speech is controlled by the brain
  
  
• The brain sends messages to the muscles in your face, lips, tongue, palate and voice box when you speak
  
  
• Problems happen when there is damage to the nerves and muscles you need to speak
  
  
• This makes the muscles weak
  
  
• These problems might make your speech slow, slurred, quiet, jerky, too fast or unclear
  
  
• Your speech might be hard to understand
  
  
• This problem is called dysarthria (pronounced dis-ar-three-a)
  
  
• Another speech problem happens when your brain can’t organise the sounds in a word
  
• In this case the muscles are NOT weak
  
  
• The brain finds it hard to send the right messages to organise the sounds in a word
  
  
• This problem is called apraxia of speech (pronounced a-praks-ee-a)