For a while now, if you are noticing that your child is not quite fluent is communicating and understanding others as the other children of the same age do, it might be a sign of concern about the speaking ability of the child. Though you don’t need to be stressed as proficient speech and language therapists can always help and provide the needed therapy to reinstate a child’s speaking ability, but you must consult them as early as possible. Speech and language therapy can help to cure the conditions like delays and disorders in expressive/receptive language, speech production, fluency, language, cognition, voice, resonance, feeding, swallowing, and hearing. Speech and language therapy also has a crucial role in literacy development along with providing curative treatment of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) which includes communication impairment too.
Speech Language pathologists (SPL) are the experts who can help your child to improve the speaking abilities and communication. They are well-trained to build and expand communication skills in young children.
Benefits of speech and language therapy for your child
Articulation or Speech intelligibility
Articulation is the process to move the tongue, lips, jaw, and palate to utter individual speech sounds called phonemes. Intelligibility means how well people can understand the words of your child. If for any reason the articulation skills are compromised, the intelligibility of the child will decrease as compared to other children of the same age. SPL’s can work with your child to teach sound patterns and thereby increasing his or her overall communicating ability.
Cognitive-Communication Skills
Cognitive-communication disorders mean impairment of cognitive skills, which includes attention, memory, abstract reasoning, awareness, and self-monitoring. These are developmental in nature (a child can be born with these problems) or can be caused due to any head injury or degenerative diseases. Speech and language pathologists can aid your child to regain the skills or teach your child other methods to deal with their deficits.
Social Language
Social language refers to the process in which a person uses language to communicate and it involves three important communication skills: communicating in a language in various ways, (like requesting, asking or protesting, etc), changing language as per the place or people (i.e. we speak differently when speaking to an adult and differently while speaking to a child), and following the norms of speaking.
Speech-language therapy can be customized as per your child’s need, which will help him or her to learn social language skills so that they can more appropriately involve in conversation with others.
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