Symptoms
Marked delay in achieving speech Continued stuttering or stammering
Home care
Speak to and listen to your baby in order to encourage speech.
Correct a child’s speech gently, but never punish or ignore the child for incorrect speech or try to make the child practice speaking.
Do not get angry or anxious if the child stutters, and don’t let other children tease or ridicule the child.
Precautions
- Consult your doctor if your child’s speech patterns do not appear to be developing according to the normally accepted timetable.
- Children learn to speak by imitation; speak, sing, and read to your child.
- A child who is not speaking clearly should not be forced, deliberately misunderstood, teased, or have attention drawn to his or her speech.
- Consult a doctor if your child speaks only in a monotone, has a marked nasal quality to his or her speech, or seems to be regressing rather than improving in vocabulary or pronunciation.
- Stuttering between the ages of two and five years old is not a problem unless it persists for several months.
- Severe, constant, or prolonged stuttering requires professional attention.
Children learn to speak by imitation, but they may learn at different rates depending on their intelligence, their hearing, and their control of the muscles involved in speaking. Speech may be delayed or impaired if the speech centers in the brain are not normal, or if there is any abnormality of the larynx, throat, nose, tongue, or lips.
A child’s normal speech development depends on how often the child hears speech and how much he or she is encouraged to speak. The average baby begins to babble and make letter-like sounds at four to six months of age. By eight months, the child has achieved a typical baby vocabulary using such “words” as “goo,” “ba-ba,” and “da-da.” By 12 months, the baby will usually be using two-syllable “words” meaningfully (“ma-ma” for mother, “ba-ba” for bottle), and by two years old will be connecting words purposefully (“go bye-bye,” “want bikki”). A child of five years can generally speak five-word sentences, and by the age of six can make all the sounds of the alphabet, except perhaps the sounds for 5 and 2.
Children between two and five years of age often lack fluency and may stutter or stammer at times. If the lack of fluency or the stuttering or stammering continues, the child may have a speech problem. Speech that does not develop normally may also be due to partial or complete deafness, mental retardation, inadequate exposure to language, brain damage, physical abnormalities, or malfunction of the speech centers (aphasia).
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