Therapeutic Issues in Work with the Intellectually Disabled – Building Linguistic, Communicative and Cognitive Competencies

People with intellectual disability constitute a group of considerable size, requiring speech therapy from the earliest stages of development. The conduct of such activity must take into account enormous variances among this section of the general population, resulting from various intellectual abilities, aetiology, noted accompanying disorders (e.g. sensory or motor), the state of health, and the environment in which the child grows up. In this article, the authors have distinguished a few sub-groups of the intellectually disabled, which from the point of view of speech therapy require various therapeutic approaches, methods and work techniques, with varying prognoses.