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HOW DOES ALS AFFECT SPEECH?

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HOW DOES ALS AFFECT SPEECH?

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ALS can lead to weakness in the muscles of articulation — the tongue, the palate and the lips — and in those that provide breath support. These changes will eventually affect your speech. Your tongue, which is composed of multiple muscles, is primarily responsible for shaping the sounds that you make into words. So, with a weakened tongue, even if you can produce sound, you may come to find it very difficult to form sounds into words that can be understood. Your soft palate (back part of the roof of the mouth) normally works by elevating and closing off your nasal passage and separating your mouth from your nose. When the palate doesn’t elevate, as often occurs in ALS, almost all sound will go up into the nasal cavity and be resonated there. This is called hypernasality.

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