Many children acquire language without experiencing difficulties in its development. When does your child need an evaluation by a speech therapist?
Many children acquire language without experiencing any difficulties in its development.
But what happens when a child is late in developing language or does not pronounce sounds well and instead of “water” produces “new” or instead of “wardrobe” says “lapa”?
When should parents contact a speech therapist?
When significant deviations from the child’s language milestones are observed, it is important for parents to contact a specialist.
Initially, it is necessary for the child to be examined by an otolaryngologist and have an audiological examination, if the infant does not respond to auditory stimuli, if the first words are not said by 12-18 months or does not understand, if the older child’s language development is significantly delayed or when the child makes many sound substitutions and his speech is not understandable.
It is important for parents to discuss any concerns they have with their pediatrician. Whenever necessary, a referral is made to a developmental psychologist to assess the areas of the child’s development.
Regarding articulation, often there are substitutions of sounds such as “thakoula” instead of “sakoula”, or omission of syllables such as “nana” instead of “banana” or alteration of sounds such as /σ/.
From the age of 4-4.5 years, the speech therapist can evaluate the child’s speech and judge when is the appropriate time to start speech therapy, the start of which depends on the intelligibility of the speech, the number and type of phonemes that the child does not produce correctly.
It is important that the substitutions made by the child have been restored before attending elementary school.
When parents are concerned about the child’s language development, they can contact a speech therapist for an evaluation from the age of 2.5-3 years if the child has delayed speaking and is slow to produce the first words, phrases and sentences. Also, a speech therapy assessment can be made if the child at the age of 4-5 years presents language difficulties and has poor vocabulary, difficulties in grammar and syntactic structure, as well as in narrating.
Parents can offer rich language stimuli through play. It is important to strengthen the child’s pre-language skills such as eye contact, imitation, taking turns, symbolic play and concentration.
Therefore, parents can respond to every communication effort of the child, play, talk, sing, imitate movements such as greeting, clapping and imitate sounds such as animals and sounds that objects make e.g. drin drin the phone, beep beep the car.
It is very important for parents to name objects at home and what their functional use is and to describe what they and the child do during the day, using simple and syntactically and grammatically structured speech.
We strengthen the understanding of simple and complex commands and ask the child “bring me the big car”, “give me the cat, the dog and the chicken”, “take the ball and put it on the table.”.
Finally, it is important to create a reading routine, as through listening to fairy tales, children can strengthen their expressive and perceptive speech.
When a child does not produce a sound correctly, parents can repeat the word and emphasize it correctly, but without correcting the child. In this way, the child focuses aurally on the correct production of the sound. For example, “Mom, I want to eat chocolate.”, “Do you want to eat chocolate? Here is the chocolate.”
Each child has his own pace of speech development and evolution. However, when speech development is significantly behind that of his peers, it is necessary to have the child evaluated by a specialist and to suggest ways to deal with his difficulties.
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