In the clinic, we often come across children with delayed speech, sometimes we can meet several of them in one day. When we ask the parents why they come to see the doctor now, the answer we get is often “The old man at home won’t let us come, saying that the child will be smart and rich if the nobleman is late in speaking! The answer is often “the old man at home won’t let him come, saying that the child will be smart and rich! But is this really the case? However, the results of our hearing exams have caused many parents to regret.
Delayed speech is defined as a disease in which the child does not speak after the age of 2 years. Some children with delayed speech are normal children, but their language development is late due to congenital genetics, the surrounding environment, parental language behavior and other influences; some children are a pathological phenomenon, mainly due to hearing, articulation, psychological, intellectual and other disorders or diseases. For the first group of children, parents can achieve good results if they put more effort into “learning to speak” with their babies, but for the second group of children, early identification, diagnosis and treatment are required, and most can regain some or even all of their language skills.
If an infant has a hearing abnormality, he or she will not be able to understand the language of others well, which will eventually lead to language developmental disorders. In clinical practice, we often encounter children with speech delay who have not had a newborn hearing screening; or children who have passed the newborn hearing screening but have speech delay in the developmental process; or children who started out with good speech development but have recently developed slurred speech. Parents should not take the above situation lightly, pay attention to the child’s response to sound is slow, the best to go to professional hearing institutions for hearing tests, to clarify whether there is a hearing impairment and the degree and nature of hearing impairment, if found abnormal to intervene early.
The main speech behavior manifestations of hearing impairment in infants and children.
Infancy.
1-3 months: No response to sudden loud noises.
4-6 months: No perception of familiar sounds from parents and other family members.
7-9 months: No active face turn toward the source of sound.
10-12 months: No response when baby’s name is called, cannot follow the instructions of an action, cannot babble
13-24 months: cannot respond to speech as heard, cannot use short sentences of 2 words
25-36 months: cannot use 3-5 word sentences and in most cases you cannot understand what your child is saying.
Childhood.
1. Involuntarily approaches or turns up the volume switch when watching TV or listening to music.
2.Language development is delayed, with poorly constructed words spelled out or spoken with a high pitch.
3. Reluctance to go to kindergarten, preference for solitude, irritability or autistic tendencies.
4.When communicating verbally, they often ask others to repeat themselves, and sometimes they can hear others, but sometimes they cannot hear them.
5. Appears to understand what others say, but behaves as if he or she “does not understand”.
6. Often inattentive in class, inattentive, with reduced academic performance and slower than other children in learning new things.
7. Can only follow one step of instruction and has difficulty carrying out multiple steps of instruction.
8. Often looks intently at the face of the speaker, trying to get more information to help understand what is being said.