Child Speech and Language
Most children develop speech and language skills within a specific age range this age range has a wide range depending upon the hereditary qualities. A child who takes much longer to learn a skill may have a problem. Speech-language pathologists, or SLPs, can help your child. American Wellness Center in Dubai Healthcare City specializes in Speech and Language Therapy for Children and Adolescents.
Speech Disorders: Some of the most common speech disorders generally observed in clinical settings.
- Childhood apraxia of speech
- Dysarthria
- Orofacial Myofunctional Disorder
- Speech Sound Disorder
- Stuttering
- Voice
Clinicians at American Wellness Center Dubai provide a high quality assessment and intervention to children with speech, language, and swallowing disorders. We provide professional development training to teachers on how to differentiate for students with speech difficulties. In addition, we work with families to guide them in providing the best home environment to support their children’s needs through alternative communication strategies.
Identify the Signs
Children usually develop at their own pace. Some children walk and talk early. Others take longer. Most children learn skills within an age range, such as between 12 and 18 months. A child who takes much longer to learn a skill may have a problem.
What are the Signs of a Speech or Language Delay?
A baby who doesn't respond to sound or vocalize should be checked by a professional with urgency. Often, it is hard for parents to know if their child is taking a bit longer to reach a speech or language milestone, or if there's a problem.
Speech and Language Delay Indicators:
- By 12 months: isn't using gestures, such as pointing or waving bye-bye
- By 18 months: prefers gestures over vocalizations to communicate
- By 18 months: has trouble imitating sounds
- has trouble understanding simple verbal requests
- By 2 years: can only imitate speech or actions and doesn't produce words or phrases spontaneously
- By 2 years: says only some sounds or words repeatedly and can't use oral language to communicate more than their immediate needs
- By 2 years: can't follow simple directions
- By 2 years: has an unusual tone of voice (such as raspy or nasal sounding)
- Parents and regular caregivers should understand about 50% of a child's speech at 2 years and 75% of it at 3 years.
- By 4 years old, a child should be mostly understood, even by people who don't know the child.
Stuttering
Young children may stutter for a little while. This is normal and will go away over time. Signs that stuttering might not stop include:
- 2½–3 years Having a lot of trouble saying sounds or words
- Repeating the first sounds of words, like "b-b-b-ball" for "ball"
- Pausing a lot while talking
- Stretching sounds out, like "fffffarm" for "farm"
Voice Disorders
Signs that your child may have a voice disorder include:
- Having a hoarse, scratchy, or breathy voice that doesn’t change.
- Sounding nasal, or like he talks through his nose.
Hearing Loss
Some children have a hearing loss at birth. Others lose their hearing as they get older. Some signs that your child may have a hearing loss include:
| Birth–1 year | Not paying attention to sounds |
| 7 months–1 year | Not responding when you call his/her name |
| 1–2 years | Not following simple directions |
Birth–3 years
| Having speech and language delays |
How can we help?
Here are the ways how our professionals can help a child with a speech and language disorder:
- Support Child with Speech Intelligibility/ Articulation Skills: Our highly qualified and experienced team proficiently support children with speech intelligibility and articulation skills. In addition, they work with the child to improve their 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. Our qualified speech and language child specialist therapist can teach a child the strategies on how to control these behaviors and thus increasing his/her speech fluency and intelligibility.
- Assist to Improve Expressive Language Skills: Our professionals are well equipped to help improve the expressive language skills of a child. Our speech-language pathologists help children learn new words and guide them on how to put them together to form perfect phrases and complete sentences (semantics and syntax) so that they can communicate on a regular basis (advance level).
- Helps with Cognitive Communication Skills: Our speech-language therapist (SLP) can appropriately support children 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). Our professionals have training and skills to work with children to help build these skills andor teach compensatory methods to assist them with their deficits.
- Uses Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC): When a speech and language therapist works 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 our speech-language therapist may involve his family to come up with an AAC system to use instead of, or alongside, of the speech.
Our center developed this department to meet the needs of families of children with challenges, based on a parent perspective. Our speech and language department caters to a broad range of communication difficulties, provides high quality assessment and intervention services.
Being a parent of a child with special needs usually requires adjustments to family life. At American Wellness Center Dubai, we aim to help you keep those adjustments to a minimum. We offer clinic and school-based therapy services to best meet the needs of your child. By catering to what works best for your family, our team of professionals provide therapy in the most convenient setting for you and your child. Our goal is to facilitate your child's growth, while incorporating this into everyday life.
Visit our clinic in Dubai Healthcare City or give us a call today.
