10 Best Stroke Recovery Speech Therapy Exercises
Stroke is a condition that impacts the blood flow to your brain, and it may cause you to experience symptoms such as slurred speech or difficulty moving one side of your body.
Stroke can have many effects on your body depending on which parts of your brain are affected. It can cause you to experience weakness or paralysis in parts of your body, an inability to speak properly, and difficulty swallowing or seeing.
In this article, we will discuss:
If you have questions or want to learn more, we will provide you with a free phone consultation.
Who is at Risk for Having a Stroke
Stroke is the fourth leading cause of death in America. Worldwide, stroke kills more people than AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. More than 795,000 people have a stroke each year in the United States. That's one person every 40 seconds!
About 2 out of 3 strokes are first (or only) strokes. The risk of having a stroke increases with age, so most people who have strokes are older than 65.
Men are 50% more likely than women to die from a stroke or heart attack. However, the risk of having a stroke is higher for women than for men.
People with high blood pressure, diabetes, or atrial fibrillation (an irregular heart rhythm) have an increased risk of stroke.
If you are at least 45 years old and smoke, you are also more likely to have a stroke. Smoking damages the blood vessels and causes your heart to beat faster than normal, increasing your risk of having problems with your blood circulation. This can raise your blood pressure and cause clots in the bloodstream that block or rupture smaller arteries, causing strokes.
The Signs and Symptoms of a Stroke
There are many different signs and symptoms that people may experience when they experience a stroke. These can include sudden weakness or numbness in the face or on one side of the body, sudden speech difficulty, double vision, dizziness or loss of balance, or a sudden and severe headache of unknown cause.
Gender and Stroke Differences
Women are often at greater risk for stroke than men. Many more women suffer from a stroke than Alzheimer's, breast cancer, or heart disease.
A stroke is the leading cause of severe long-term disability in women. Women have more stroke events than men because of their longer life expectancy and older age at the time of stroke.
A doctor may look for signs of a stroke in women by performing a physical exam and asking questions about her symptoms. Tests such as MRIs and CTs can be helpful to detect issues with blood flow in the brain. Difficulty speaking, facial drooping, and vision loss are all signs of a stroke.
It is also common for women to have a stroke without any obvious warning signs or symptoms. Some of a stroke's main signs and symptoms include headaches, nausea, vomiting, loss of balance, weakness on one side of your body, and pain in your jaw, face, or tongue.
Men are less likely to experience a stroke than women. There is little evidence to show that either men or women have more severe symptoms following a stroke.
Stroke Symptoms in Children and Teenagers
Kids and teens with stroke may not recognize or verbalize the signs and symptoms of a stroke, so their parents and caretakers need to be aware of the warning signs that they may exhibit.
Not all stroke symptoms are unique to children. Still, some are specific to this age group, such as having a weak leg or arm, trouble walking or moving around, complaining of feeling sick to their stomach or vomiting, or having trouble speaking or understanding others.
How Speech is Affected by a Stroke
A stroke may have lasting effects, such as trouble speaking, weakness on one side of the body, impaired memory, thinking, and vision changes. A stroke makes it difficult to express yourself, so getting back into your everyday routine can be difficult.
Communication problems may include:
Aphasia
Aphasia is a disorder that affects language and both speaking and understanding. It ranges in severity depending on the location and extent of the damage to the brain. Signs and symptoms of aphasia may include difficulty finding words ("anomia"), placing words in the wrong order, having trouble expressing thoughts, or misunderstanding what people mean. Approximately 25-40% of stroke survivors acquire aphasia.
Dysarthria
Dysarthria is an impairment in speech characterized by slurred speech, poor pitch control, loudness, rhythm, and voice. Movement of the muscles used for speech can be limited in several ways, including moving too far, moving in the wrong direction, and having poor timing or strength. This may result in speech that is challenging to understand, unnatural, and imprecise. There are numerous types of dysarthria, such as flaccid, spastic, ataxic, hypokinetic, hyperkinetic, and mixed (Walshe & Miller, 2011). Dysarthria can either be congenital or developmental. Some activities for dysarthria that may be addressed include:
Slowing down the rate of speech
Learning how to speak louder
Exercising the muscles of the mouth to make them stronger
Enunciating sounds in words and sentences to have clearer speech
Acquired Apraxia of Speech
Apraxia of Speech occurs when messages from the brain become disrupted due to damage to areas of the brain that control coordination between muscles. A person with such difficulties in forming words cannot control the muscles in the lips or tongue; thus, the lips do not make letters sound correct. Individuals with apraxia may have difficulty breaking down and sequencing speech sounds, which makes speaking difficult. The severity of apraxia varies on a spectrum from mild to severe. Someone with severe apraxia of speech may be unable to speak at all. Once Apraxia of Speech is diagnosed, the speech-language pathologist develops an individualized treatment plan based on their findings. The speech-language pathologist will design specific interventions to help improve the person’s ability to plan and produce oral movements for speech sounds.
Treatment may include exercises to improve motor skills, oral-motor exercises, and strategies for increasing vocabulary or sentence length. A speech-language pathologist will work with the client and family to implement home practice procedures that can help promote speech changes.
The intervention aims to reduce or correct apraxia symptoms and increase functional communication skills in everyday communication situations.
Dysarthria vs Apraxia
While dysarthria is a problem that originates from weakened muscles, apraxia of speech is a problem with planning muscle movements necessary to speak.
Dysarthria and apraxia treatment exercises are different from each other. The course of treatment for each depends on the disorder's severity and unique characteristics.
How Memory is Affected by a Stroke
A common symptom experienced after a stroke is memory loss. You may have difficulty remembering certain words, recent events, or concepts (like time).
Strokes that affect the areas of the brain that control memory and language may make it difficult to remember events that occurred just before or after your stroke. You may also have difficulty recalling memories from long ago.
One of the most critical things you can do for your memory is to keep it engaged. The more you exercise and engage your brain, the better your memory will work properly following a stroke.
Do an activity that requires problem-solving, such as crossword puzzles, brain games, computer games, or reading books with unfamiliar words. It's important not to simply "zone out" when trying to remember something.
If you or a loved one have memory problems, try talking to your physician or neurologist about the best ways to improve this symptom.
How Body Movements are Affected by a Stroke
Strokes can affect your ability to coordinate body movements. This can be mild, such as shakiness while writing, or severe, like trouble walking.
Learning how to do things that use fine motor skills, like threading a needle, can be frustrating for stroke patients, but try not to get frustrated if you can't get it at first. It may take several attempts or a lot of practice before you can thread the needle smoothly.
More significant movements like walking or reaching for an object may also become impaired following a stroke. Physical and occupational therapy is often needed to improve these fine and gross motor skills.
10 Best Brain Exercises for Stroke Recovery
1) Strengthen your Tongue and Lips
If you have a weakness in your tongue, you can try these various tongue-strengthening exercises.
Sticking your tongue in and out or side to side will help make the tongue muscle stronger.
If you have weakness in your lips, you can practice making various mouth shapes, such as a circle or smiling widely.
2) Match and Identify Objects
Stroke patients may have trouble determining how shapes, numbers, letters, or words are similar or different. You can play these activities for stroke patients:
Say or describe shapes, pictures, or letters of the alphabet.
Use cards to match a picture to its corresponding word or sentence.
Play the memory game.
3) Use "Real-Life" Activities
Using real-life activities for stroke patients is a great speech therapy exercise. Here are some examples of activities that you can do at home:
Look at your area's weather and explain the extended forecast to a friend.
Look at a medicine label and write down the instructions for how to take the medication properly.
Look at the TV guide and find a show you'd like to watch and tell someone about the show and what day and time it is scheduled to air.
Read an email or text from a friend and respond by dictating or typing.
4) Practice Thinking of Words
If you have trouble thinking of the words you want, you can try these helpful word-finding strategies. This activity is useful for people with aphasia:
Think of the name of a word that means the same and the opposite. For example, the opposite of "hot" is "cold," and the opposite of "wet" is "dry."
Name as many items in a category as you can. For example, you can name five types of fruit.
5) Understand Words and Paragraphs
Aphasia patients can have difficulty understanding words. It can help to do one of these speech exercises:
Place several objects in front of the person with aphasia. Say the name of one of the objects and see if the aphasia patient can identify the correct object among the choices.
Read a short story to the person with aphasia and ask them simple questions related to the story.
6) Improve Reading Comprehension Skills
Sometimes, reading is affected by a stroke. You can improve your reading skills by doing simple activities such as identifying a word that doesn't belong in a group of written words or matching a word with the corresponding picture.
A more complex activity might involve reading a paragraph and answering simple questions related to the story or summarizing the story aloud.
7) Practice Writing
Stroke patients can try speech therapy exercises that relate to their writing skills. One way to work on writing is to fill in the blank when a letter is missing in a word. Copying words is also helpful. If you have a partner to work with, listen to a word read aloud and spell the word that you hear.
8) Learn How to Make Sense of Numbers
Stroke patients can have difficulty with number communication skills. Counting up on your fingers and writing numbers in the air is an excellent place to start practicing.
Next, you can practice naming the numbers as fast as you can. As you progress, you can practice written numbers, such as addresses, phone numbers, time, measurements, or money.
9) Improve Visual Attention
Everyday skills such as reading a clock can be affected by a stroke. To practice this skill, look at an analog clock or watch and say the time aloud. In another activity, you may look at two similar but slightly different pictures. This exercise challenges you to find one slight difference between two otherwise identical pictures and can help to improve your visual skills.
10) Putting Steps in Order
If putting things in order (sequencing) is a problem after a stroke, you can practice telling a friend the steps involved in something that you are skilled at and enjoy, such as how to make a favorite recipe, how to grow a garden, how to catch a fish or even how to swing a golf club!
Speech Therapy Services for Stroke Patients
A Speech-Language Pathologist can help stroke survivors with language, cognitive, and swallowing difficulties.
After a stroke or brain injury, the brain is not working as well as it used to; this includes understanding and using language. The speech therapist helps stroke patients deal with these issues by identifying their difficulties and providing appropriate speech therapy.
The speech therapist will also aid the stroke patient in maintaining their independence and mobility by providing information on compensatory strategies. The speech therapy exercises focus on maintaining or regaining these abilities at a high level of recovery.
Connected Speech Pathology: Online Speech Therapy
At Connected Speech Pathology, our speech-language pathologists provide speech therapy for those affected by a stroke, brain tumor, or brain injury. We have master's degrees in communication sciences and disorders and completed rigorous post-graduate training. Our speech therapists are focused on delivering quality, effective speech therapy exercises.
The initial step is to set up a free phone consultation with our lead speech-language pathologist to start with speech therapy.
Our speech therapy services include:
ASSESSMENT
The assessment process begins by evaluating your educational and medical background. We are going to observe the stroke patient and interview caregivers.
We will also use informal and formal speech-language assessments to create a speech therapy diagnosis. This multi-stage assessment process includes observation of speech, language, and cognitive abilities. This is necessary because it will help us determine if the stroke patient has enough strengths in these areas to allow for participation in remote speech therapy. It will also identify what needs to be addressed during treatment to create an appropriate treatment plan.
CREATING GOALS
Our philosophy is that speech therapy should focus on each individual and their communication goals. In other words, we set your treatment goals to create meaningful outcomes that will improve your ability to communicate and live better in real-life situations.
PROVIDING TREATMENT
We offer a therapy program to fit your needs and will adapt it as you improve. The goal is to enhance your speech and language skills. Our speech-language pathologists will help you with your speech therapy exercises and improve your communication skills. The tools and home exercises we use will depend on the assessment results from our first meeting.
About the Author
Allison Geller is a speech-language pathologist (SLP) and the owner of Connected Speech Pathology. She obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Florida in Speech-Language Pathology. Allison has practiced speech therapy in a number of settings including telepractice, acute care, outpatient rehabilitation, and private practice. She has worked extensively with individuals across the lifespan including toddlers, preschoolers, school-aged children, and adults. She specializes in the evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment of a variety of communication disorders including receptive/expressive language disorders, articulation disorders, voice disorders, fluency disorders, brain injury, and swallowing disorders.
Allison served as the clinical coordinator of research in aphasia in the Neurological Institute at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. She is on the Board of Directors for the Corporate Speech Pathology Network (CORSPAN), a Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT) certified clinician, and a proud Family Empowerment Scholarship/Step-Up For Students provider. Allison is passionate about delivering high quality-effective treatment remotely because it’s convenient and easy to access. What sets us apart from other online speech therapy options is—Allison takes great care to hire the very best SLPs from all over the country.
Please contact us if you have any questions.
