Understand Your Child

Specific Conditions - Speech / Language Difficulties

What are they?

Speech and language skills occur in two ways:

Expressive (spoken or produced) language (or “speech”): Including the mechanics of producing speech (such as the process of making sounds using the lungs, vocal cords, mouth, tongue, teeth, etc).

Receptive (understanding of) language: understanding language in order to follow instructions.

Common difficulties with speech and language skills:
Speech and language delay: indicates that the child is following the typical skill development progression or sequence, albeit slower than considered typical so they are delayed in skill acquisition for their age.

Speech and language disorder: indicates that the child is not following the typical skill development sequence, and as such is experiencing something other than simply a ‘delay’ in mastering age appropriate communication.

What are the features of it?
• Impairment in expressive and/or receptive language
• Poor pronunciation, so that they are hard to understand
• They have difficulty understanding instructions (more than age expected)
• Limited amount of speech produced
• Limited vocabulary or confuses the intended words
• Uses shortened sentences
• Has difficulty understanding words or sentences

Common challenges experienced by those with speech and language difficulties:
• Difficulty acquiring new words
• Difficulties thinking of the right word (‘word finding’ difficulties or vocabulary errors)
• Limited grammatical structures
• Limited varieties of types of sentences (imperatives/questions)
• Difficulty understanding words or sentences
• May be only difficulty understanding particular types of words (eg spatial terms)
• Deficits in auditory processing
• Extreme frustration, quick to get wound up
• Limited persistence in communicating with others so they socially withdraw

Management strategies that support the child with speech and language difficulties: (at preschool, school or home)
• Use of visual cues as a supplement to language
• Slower rate of communication than typical
• Devices - supplied by speech therapists where appropriate

Occupational therapy approaches and activities that can support the individual or their carers include:
• Supplement the communication process with the use of visual cues
• Providing simple and concise language (especially in instructions)
• Visual modelling of the task requested of them
• Physical and visual instructions to accompany verbal instructions
• Letter sound/awareness
• Strategies for spelling and sentence structure
• Word association games