LANGUAGE AND SPEECH DISORDERS IN CHILDREN

PSYCHOLOGY

Many children will experience a temporary delay in speech and language development. Most will eventually catch up. Others will continue to have difficulty with communication development. Communication disorders include speech disorders and language disorders. Speech disorders are discussed in this article and some general guidelines are also given. This will help you decide if your child needs to be tested by a speech-language pathologist. A child with a speech disorder may have difficulty with speech sound production, voice, resonance or fluency (the flow of speech). A child with a speech sound disorder is unable to say all of the speech sounds in words. This can make the child’s speech hard to understand. People may not understand the child in everyday situations. For most children, the cause of the speech sound disorder is unknown. Other speech sound disorders can be linked to things such as a cleft palate, problems with the teeth, hearing loss, or difficulty controlling the movements of the mouth. Most research on children with speech difficulties has focused on single words and has failed to take account of these children’s sentence-level abilities. In practice it is common for children to be diagnosed and treated according to their most prominent difficulty - either speech or language. This status quo may, in part, be due to the unintelligible productions of some children with speech disorders, which make it difficult to determine their sentence-level abilities.

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