Cognitive impairments can occur as a result of traumatic brain injury (TBI), stroke, hypoxic-hypotensive injuries, encephalitis, and other infectious disorders, and brain tumors. These injuries can impact multiple aspects of cognition and can result in challenges in the area of communication and can have a profound impact on one’s ability to complete everyday basic tasks. Language may become fragmented, devoid of content, tangential, and may also include social communication deficits or decreased ability to use language appropriately in social situations. Individuals may experience memory challenges and difficulty with problem-solving.
How can a Speech-Language Pathologist help?
Speech-Language Pathologists can support individuals experiencing cognitive-communication challenges; specifically, by working toward rehabilitation in the areas of executive functioning. Executive function describes a set of cognitive processes and mental skills that help an individual plan, monitor, and successfully execute their goals. The “executive functions,” as they are known, include attention, memory, inhibition, and problem-solving.
SLPs work together to form partnerships with their clients and their client’s family. Clinical power and change are a direct result of collaboration between the SLP, client, family members, or other caregivers. This partnership considers the expert knowledge that families have about their own members and functioning. SLPs can affect meaningful change in executive functions when they have developed a healthy therapeutic alliance with all members of the team. Some ways in which a SLP can help support individuals experiencing cognitive-communication challenges are:
- Placing an emphasis on collaboration and participation
- Providing purposeful, yet problem-focused intervention that builds on client strengths.
- Providing treatment around education, empowerment, advocacy, self-control, and self-sufficiency.
- Providing structured treatment plans and activities based on assessment results and therapy data.
- Working toward goals that include compensatory strategies to support limitations in the areas of executive functions including work around attention and memory.
- Assisting clients in achieving an accurate understanding of their strengths and limitations.
- Implementation of a variety of techniques and strategies to improve abilities, teach new and compensatory skills, facilitate regulation of behavior, and to modify negative, disruptive, thoughts feelings, and emotions.
- Consideration, and incorporation into the treatment plan, each client’s previous and present lifestyle, including abilities, goals, values, relationships, roles, personality, and behavior patterns.
- Training on use of external aids as a compensatory strategy for managing difficulties with executive functioning.
- Providing treatment focused on pragmatic challenges (e.g., social skills training such as topic maintenance, greetings/farewells, turn-taking, proximity, etc.)
