Speech and language are considered the two most important fundamental aspects for expressing and getting understood by the people. Above all, it is considered as a basic need of every person. This gets started right from when the child is born and our brains start to respond to our parents’ voices. As a child, we generally prefer to make contact through facial expressions, vocalization, eye gaze as well as actions that help in controlling the world around us.
It’s quite obvious that a child is not born with a ready-to-use vocabulary skills or the complex language structures. Gradually, as they are exposed to the language and experiences, they start to build their knowledge of words and starts to mimic the language that they hear around them. But in some cases, there is observed a considerable delay in the speech development. As a result, the parents could consult the speech therapist.
But before that, you need to understand why speech development is being delayed. According to one of the leading speech improvement centers or speech therapy solution in Camarillo, below are listed some of the reasons responsible for the delay in speech development. Let us have a look at those reasons:
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The family, teachers, as well as friends, sometimes face difficulty in understanding child’s speech. This ultimately makes it difficult for a child to share his ideas, build friendships, develop language skills as well as participate in different activities. This impacts the child negatively and hampers its self-concept and social as well as academic participation.
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Children usually starts learning and developing their reading and writing skills by applying their speech sound knowledge as well as decoding and creating words from it. For instance, the some children may spell the word ‘Cat’ as ‘Kat’ as ‘C’ is hard to spell or ‘Tat’ as it sounds the same way from the word.
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Children having a problem of mispronouncing the speech sounds will face difficulty in sounding out the words due to the auditory feedback loop. Some of the persistent speech sound errors could negatively impact the literacy development.
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The language challenges could also negatively impact the literacy development. The reading and writing helps the child in adapting the words in order to change their meaning, knowing the meaning of the word, creating complete sentence as well as interpreting the sentence message. This affects the literacy of the child.
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A language delay could make it feel as an important part of the puzzle missing and it creates a void that has no idea as to where to get attached. As a result, a strong support is needed for engaging the child and become self-motivated explorers for the knowledge.
What Is Speech Therapy Process?
The speech therapy majorly involves the teaching technique of how to coordinate the air stream, mouth, and mind for accurately producing a speech sound, like the sound of ‘S’. For this, the child is taught to place his tongue behind his top teeth and then allowed to let a thin stream of air leak out of his mouth: ‘SSSSSSSS’. Generally, this is not easy for many children and thus the therapist need to teach them according to some individual strategy. This ultimately helps each child in experiencing the success as well as get motivation.
As soon as the child gets success in making the sound, the speech therapist works towards developing the hierarchy of complexity. Slowly, this expands while including to make the sound in syllables, words, sentences and finally in conversation. A complete training is given to those children who are striving hard in developing their speech skills. The early language learners, as well as children having severe challenges, can experience a good adventure that helps the child in building blocks of the functional language.
Thus, with the several engaging sessions, the therapist would use different techniques in order to make the child independent with using their own speech and language skills.
