5 Ways an SLP Can Help You With Your Child’s Speech & Language Development
Undoubtedly, speech and language are central to every human being. They are the vital means by which each individual convey and receive knowledge, feelings, thoughts, and other internal experiences. Acquisition of speech and language skills begins early in childhood and is foundational to the ability to gain access to culturally transmitted knowledge, to organize and share thoughts and feelings, and to participate in social interactions and relationships. Proper development of speech and language skills are crucial to the development of thinking ability, a sense of self, and full participation in society.
Speech and language delays and disorders often cause disruptions in communication development and can have a wide-ranging impact on the ability to communicate. Additionally, such delays or disorders in speech and language can also obstruct to obtain new knowledge and participate fully in society. So, it is therefore important that proper treatment is conducted for speech and language disorders at the early stage.
If you address your child with delays and disorders in expressive/receptive language, speech production, language, cognition, fluency, voice, resonance, feeding, swallowing, and hearing, etc., then immediately consult with a speech and language therapist to obtain adequate treatment assistance. The primary goal of a speech and language therapist is to optimize a child’s ability to communicate and to swallow, therefore improving their overall quality of life. Speech and language therapies include a variety of modalities and only an SLP can assist you with the right treatment with a certain speech and language disability. The speech and language pathologists near you at Hope Abilitation Medical Center in Dubai can offer you assistance in this regard. We have a skilled team and proven state-of-the-art rehabilitation techniques invented worldwide under one roof. We offer pediatric neurological rehabilitation services like speech and language therapy, sensory integration, feeding therapy, physiotherapy, etc.
To understand how speech and language pathologists at Hope AMC can help your child, continue reading the blog article in detail.
5 Primary Ways How a Speech and Language Pathologist Can Help Your Child
Do you know that a speech and language pathologist can help your children with speech and language disorders or delays? How do you think they can assist your child with speech and language disorders? Let’s take a look at the below context!
A speech and language pathologist is a person, who works with children for a variety of delays and disorders spanning from mild articulation to more complex disabilities like autism, down syndrome, motor speech disorders, etc. An SLP helps your child with speech, talking and communication. They offer assistance for a wide number of speech disabilities. Here are the ways how they can help a child with a speech and language disorder:
- Helps Your Child with Speech Intelligibility/ Articulation Skills
An SLP can proficiently help a child with speech intelligibility and articulation skills. They can work with your child to teach them how to produce the specific speech sounds or sound patterns that they are having difficulty with, and this helps increase their overall speech intelligibility. Also, they assist to improve the child’s physical ability to move the tongue, jaw, lips, and palate to produce individual speech sounds that are generally called phonemes.
- Improve Speech Fluency or Stuttering in Your Child
There are many children who face problems of stuttering that often affect their speech fluency. Children having problems of stuttering often primarily show up with the following behaviors like repetitions, prolongations, interjections, and blocks. Some may also show up with secondary behavioral problems, which is typically observed in children with more severe stuttering conditions like tension in the neck, jaw, chest, eye blinks, nose flaring, other odd facial movements, clenched fists, stomping of feet, jerking or other unusual motor movements in the arms, hands, feet, and legs.
An SLP can teach your child the strategies on how to control these behaviors and thus increasing his/her speech fluency and intelligibility.
- Assist to Improve Expressive Language Skills
SLPs helps to improve the expressive language skills of a child. Speech-language pathologists offering assistance near you can help your child learn new works and how to put them together to form perfect phrases and complete sentences (semantics and syntax) so that your child can communicate with you and others.
- Helps with Cognitive Communication Skills
A speech-language therapist (SLP) can appropriately help your child with cognitive communication skills. Generally, these kinds of disorders in children refer to impairment of cognitive processes including attention, abstract reasoning, awareness, memory, and executive functions (self-monitoring, planning, problem-solving). An SLP can work with your child to help build these skills and\or teach your child compensatory methods to assist them with their deficits.
- Uses Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) with Your Child
When a speech and language therapist work with your child to treat his/her speech and language disorder, their primary goal is always to improve communication. Many times, a child might have a severe disorder that makes traditional oral speech impossible to conduct. In such circumstances, an SLP (or speech-language therapist) may work with your child and his family to come up with an AAC system to use instead of, or alongside, of speech. It is significant to note that AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) methods are always not used to replace speech. Instead, it is used as a bridge to the speech. Children can use the AAC methods to communicate while still working on developing speech skills.
The therapists at Hope AMC are experienced with a variety of AAC methods and picture and symbol communication boards as well as various electronic devices. The team at Hope AMC will choose the appropriate communication method to help the child, school, and family to use it effectively.
To know more speak to our speech and language therapists near you in Dubai. To contact call us at +97143460066 or visit hope-amc.com
