Continuous Speech Therapy

As a child is beginning to learn words and to speak, sometimes difficult and challenges may occur but most can overcome the difficulties and strive in the world of language. With others, the difficulties stick around causing speech problems, which means there can be an underlying cause for the problem to occur. There can be articulation problems meaning the child will drop, add, swap or distort words making it hard to understand what they are trying to say or to know the meaning of the word. Underlying causes could be they have Autism, a brain injury, auditory problem, physical abnormalities (cleft plate or cleft lip), disorders affecting the nerves, or they have a literacy problem. Some will go through continuous speech therapy to fix the
Treatment of a speech disorder can be provided to all ages and they come in many variations, for example; some may be born with a disorder and others may have acquired it over time because of a trauma or a traumatic brain injury (TBI). The diagnosis of a speech problem begins with the evaluation of the person and is then narrowed down to a speech problem such as, articulation, fluency or stutter, and voice disorders. In addition, they evaluate whether there is a language problem such as slowed or delayed speech, aphasia, dysphasia which is a difficulty swallowing and other related disorders. Other disorders can include someone having a cleft plate or cleft lip, deaf people, expressive and/or language comprehension, autism, and also when someone just wants to learn to communicate or speak clearer. With so many different etiologies for speech disorders, a growing number of case studies and research programs in the field of communications and speech therapy have emerged to help those with any such disorder. One area of concern is whether there is any correlation between children having a speech disorder and when they begin therapy after being diagnosed. There are children that are born with a Speech Sound Disorder (SSD), which is when a child’s speech sounds are not produced correctly, not produced at all or used incorrectly also including problems with articulation (making sounds) and phonological processes (sound patterns)(American Speech-Language-Hearing Association). Children who have been diagnosed with SSD, 27% have shown to also have a propensity to have some type of literacy disorder as well (Lewis et al., 2015). Researchers have begun to look into the correlation between the child being diagnosed compared to when they began therapy immediately after being diagnosed