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Webwords 6
ACQUIRED COMMUNICATION DISORDERS
Aphasia, Dysarthria and Dyspraxia
The ACQ Internet Column October 2000
Caroline Bowen
 
a choir "Nerida, what does acquire mean?" Her fleeting glance reflected a significant improvement in the eye-contact stakes. "How can I know what a choir means?" she rasped. "A choir is a whole bunch of singers, right? Their songs don't mean anything...because you can't understand them right, because they all sing at once." She scowled bleakly for emphasis, adolescence looming. "Not that sort of 'a choir' - I mean this sort of 'acquire'." I wrote it down.
 
Something you didn't have before
"Oh!" she said, "Acquire. Acquire means you've got something you didn't have before. When I pick things up at the bank, dad says, "Where did you acquire all those forms? But I don't tell him because he already knows they're from the bank. He says 'acquire' right because he doesn't want to say 'steal' and he can't say shoplifting because its bank lifting. Ha ha". She laughed dryly and warmed to the topic. "When I speak 'french' he says, 'And how did you acquire that language?'" 

Characteristically, Nerida, who fits neither the Asperger's nor the semantic pragmatic language disorder (SPLD) criteria precisely,  wanted to grapple minutely and pedantically with all the ramifications of the word "acquire". Her unique perspective on the meanings and use of words gave pause for thought.

"Acquiring", acquisition" and "acquired" are apposite words for speech-language pathologists. "Acquiring" came in jolly handy, for example, when the ACQ (Australian Communication Quarterly) was distilled into a three-times-a-year clinical and professional extravaganza cleverly retaining the name, but with the subscript "ACQuiring knowledge in speech, language and hearing". We use the term "language acquisition" to cover a miraculous, unfolding process that is not just about learning a skill, but which involves multi-layered interconnections between innate capacities, maturation, development and environmental influences. Then we speak of "acquired communication disorders" where "acquired" also has subtle nuances and connotations, reflecting the complexity of what occurs, why it occurs, and how, when normal language function is disrupted in a range of ways. 
 
These ways include stroke, traumaand other brain injuries, tumours, and diseases of the central and peripheral nervous systems. Infants and children, young people and mature individuals are all represented in this special population that have "got something they didn't have before" in the form of aphasia, dysarthria or dyspraxia. Among the informational web sites that deal with acquired communication disorders are an ASHA article on aphasia, neurology links from MedWeb Plus, Sandy and Liz Herring, and the Hardin Library (in the person of Eric Rumsey) at the University of Iowa. The Society for Neuroscience  database devotes a section to information about disorders and diseases. Additionally, there are over one hundred sites and thousands of hyperlinks in the Child Neurology Home Page.

Conference logs on
Internet history was made at the New Zealand Speech and Language Therapists' biennial conference in April 2000, and the 300 plus participants acquired a few wrinkles! It was a lot of fun in Napier enjoying Hawkes Bay hospitality, and doing a three day presentation. It included an on-line (mostly - the server bumped me off mid-sentence at one point!) demonstration of the Internet for Speech and Language Therapists, hands-on tutorials covering WYSIWYG and HTML website building for beginners, and the highly successful NZSTA Internet Café, that ran for the duration of the conference. Among the participants were the NZSTA and Speech Pathology Australia presidents (Evelyn Terris and Kath Vidler, respectively). <snip> It was a novel experience to see colleagues surfing en masse. 
 
Intervention
 Carol Bishop's Speech Sounds on Cue (formerly Dyspraxia Drills on Disc), the interactive dysphasia React Program, and materials from Bungalow Software can all be ordered online. The Harvard neurology web forums ARCHIVES  provide opportunities for discussion of 117 specific neurological conditions and 24 general subjects. 

There is a sense in Cyberspace that speech-language pathologists are only just starting to discover the potential of the web and multimedia as intervention tools. Sketchpad, the creation of Alissa Vertes and Kristy Weissling, Speech-Language Pathologists at Nova Southeastern University, is one example. Sketchpad allows patients from anywhere with neurogenic communication disorders to display their creative writing - something my colleague Freida van Staden is also doing with children with literacy difficulties. Freida also contributed an article to ACQ that appears in the October 2000 edition in the My Top 10 Resources series.
 
Links 
Maxine Bevin from Napier suggested these excellent sites.
QU Aphasia Groups 
UK Connect
Jennifer Sweeney 
suggested a link to the 
BC Aphasia Centre
More Links 
Brain Injury Links
Pediatric Stroke Network
TBI & Motor Speech Disorders

Webwords Index 
 
 
 

Page updated 12 May 2009

 
 

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