What is wrong with my child’s unclear speech?

  In the daily outpatient work of the child health center, many mothers say to me with great concern that my child does not speak clearly and no one else can understand what he is saying. Speech is the sound of communication with others. Speech disorders refer to the impairment of the ability to produce normal speech, of which dysarthria is one of the more common manifestations of speech disorders.  Dysarthria is caused by errors in articulation position, timing, airflow or uncoordinated oral movements, and the more common dysarthria are as follows: 1. “These children often use the root of the tongue instead of the front of the tongue position pronunciation; 2. For example, p, t, k, c, s and other aspirated sounds, when children replace the aspirated sound with a non-aspirated sound is wrong, such as “mother-in-law” said “uncle”; 4, omitted: that is, omit some parts of the language, such as “airplane “said as “fly”.  What should I do if my child has these situations? Most children with mispronunciation do not notice their own problems, express themselves as usual, and can understand and accept other people’s speech or language expressions. If the child is unable to distinguish between correct and incorrect pronunciation, the child should have a hearing test by an ENT physician, except for hearing abnormalities.       When the child can identify and realize the mispronunciation, we can do the following treatments: 1. Phoneme level treatment: When the child has several mispronunciations, the treatment always starts with the earliest sound that appears in normal children, we call it the target sound. Firstly, we help the child to recognize the correct target sound and mouth shape, and secondly, we conduct auditory training to distinguish the target sound from the wrong sound. 2. Syllable level therapy: A new target sound is often unstable when first learning, so we need to strengthen it in syllables, i.e., to form meaningless syllables with other vowels and consonants, so that the child can consolidate the target sound when learning pronunciation. 3. Word level therapy: Introduce the target sound into meaningful words. Word level should be in line with the child’s cognitive level and often seen in daily life. How to assess the child’s cognitive level? We need to do a neuropsychological developmental level test for the child at this time to understand the child’s current developmental level. For example, some children are currently three years old, but their cognitive level is only equivalent to a one-and-a-half year old child, so the child’s phonological training goals and treatment methods need to 4. Sentence level therapy: The doctor conducting the language assessment needs to understand the child’s living environment and social environment and select sentences that are suitable for the child’s application to reinforce the target sounds. There is also another training that is important for the child’s language development, namely oral function training. Abnormalities in oral function can affect the clarity of a child’s speech. Oral training varies from person to person and requires an individual assessment of the child’s oral function and, if necessary, the evaluation and treatment of a specialist such as a stomatologist or otorhinolaryngologist, but in general, the goal of oral training is to improve the child’s proprioceptive sense of the tongue to better master articulation, except in the case of pathology.  Parents should be reminded that language training for children is a relatively long process, some children may improve in the short term, some parents may stop training after the improvement, but most of the improvement is temporary. Sometimes we meet parents who are very anxious, who train endlessly every day, who are very angry at their child’s mistakes, and who even punish them, which makes their children very tired and bored, and who are oppositional and defiant, which affects the effectiveness of the treatment. For the child’s language training, we need to encourage the child’s progress step by step, so that the child can gain a sense of achievement, thus stimulating interest and achieving final success.