Speech Difficulties
Speech Difficulties
Speech difficulties are becoming more common and prevalent now that there is a lot more research and awareness of it. During the first moments of life, are the moments where communication is established between an child and their parent. Infants start to communicate and affect adults by cries, gaze, movements and facial expressions (Faith, 2012).Their social interaction with their parents and those around them becomes structured around what they are capable of doing (Faith, 2012). According to Faith (2012), “these early interactions can be said to contribute to later speech difficulties; however there is no certainty that the absence of early experiences would prevent the later development of speech difficulties.” As each child develops differently and at different paces, this growth and any problems therefore may go unnoticed. Similarly, the differences between cases of those who encounter speech difficulties could be temporary or permanent and the cause varies substantially (Faith, 2012).
In childhood, where they progress from babbling all the way to more difficult grammatical speech as they enter school, some children’s process requires a lot more effort and specialized help (Faith, 2012). Speech difficulties can occur in both acquiring language and using the language system to communicate (Faith, 2012). According to Faith (2012), “speech difficulties are identified when a child has problems in the acquisition and development of oral language.” These speech difficulties can occur for a variety of reasons, such as physical disabilities like hearing loss, early language experiences, or as part of general difficulty in learning and cognitive functions (Faith, 2012)
A very important part of speech difficulty is its identification, as this paves the way straight to any treatment or intervention. A lot of cases of speech difficulties often go unnoticed and it becomes less obvious to take action unless the parent notices something unusual or a professional expresses a concern. It has been said that the identification of speech difficulties is problematic, however, according to Faith (2012) ”all the tests focus on the three main issues which include, performance on language test below the child chronological, discrepancy between a child’s language skills and their non-verbal abilities and also the language abilities that cannot be attributed to any other causes.”
Some of the difficulties that could be among some of the children that have speech difficulties may include some of the following:
- Delayed Speech: some children may have a delayed speech which does eventually get to the same level of their peers without problems, however, other children speech difficulties are a much bigger problem that needs some intervention (Faith, 2012).
- Auditory Processing Problems: According to Faith (2012), “To learn a language a child must be able to detect when sounds occur and also discriminate between and categorize sounds. Problems with early stages of auditory processing are particularly significant for language acquisition.”
- Vocabulary Problems: Speech difficulties can be related to difficulties in learning new words and producing known words (Faith, 2012). That word is in heir vocabulary, but the problem comes from where they are trying to retrieve that word to use.
- Grammatical Problems: Speech Difficulties can manifest themselves in a number of ways including output, omissions of function of words and short utterances (Faith, 2012). According to Faith (2012), “the explanations given for these difficulties include perception deficits, inability to compute syntactic relations and failure of innate syntactic abilities to mature.’
From the above work, the importance of intervention for speech difficulties is especially emphasised for younger children when it is just noticed either by the parent of other member of society.
Luckily, Catch Up Kids has a team of highly-skilled and trained instructors who can work with your child to remediate all of the above-mentioned difficulties using a variety of research-based methods.
Bibliography
Faith, K. (2012). Speech and Language Difficulties: An assessment of the parents experiences who have children with speech. Retrieved January 29, 2019, from https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/48473/Faith%20Kilpelainen%202012%20Kemi%20Thesis.pdf?sequence=1
