Children can often face difficulty in pronouncing sounds. This hinders their ability to communicate their messages. While some children may misarticulate the sounds, others may stammer and simply not fluently. Whatever the case may be, speech impediments can greatly reduce the confidence level and in adverse cases, shatter them. Such speech problems are common amongst toddlers, but after a certain age, they can become a setback.
Specialized speech therapy Dubai clinics incorporate the necessary therapies and techniques to improve their speech, communication skills, and self-confidence altogether. These speech disorders can be the result of an illness or an injury like stroke or brain injury.
Regardless of the case or reason, there are several speech disorders that can be treated. If your child has any one of these, speech therapy sessions will surely work for them.
Articulation Disorders
We have often heard some children pronounce words with improper sounds. The most common ones are ‘wabbit’, ‘cool’ and ‘thith’, instead of ‘rabbit’, ‘school’ and ‘this’. Children tend to do so because they can drop, swap, distort, or simply add a new word sound.
Fluency Disorders
Fluency disorder simply affects the speed, flow, and rhythm of speech. Common fluency disorders are seen in children stuttering and cluttering during speech. Stuttering speech sounds more blocked and interrupted, while the cluttering speech sounds more like a machine-gun, where the words seem to be running into each other.
Resonance Disorders
Anyone diagnosed with resonance disorder will have a different and not-so-clear voice quality. The airflow passes through the nasal or oval cavities and triggers voice vibrations. These voice vibrations, when altered, result in different vibrations. The person listening on the other side will hear muffled speech, high-pitched voices, or nasal-sounding voices. A child suffering from resonance disorder will also have mild to moderate signs of illnesses. These can include neurological disorders, swollen tonsils, and cleft palate.
Expressive Disorder
As the name suggests, this disorder is associated with difficulty in conveying or expressing information. Any child with the expressive disorder will have trouble forming accurate sentences, incorrect verb usage and are commonly visible in impairments like Down Syndrome and hearing loss.
Cognitive-communication Disorder
Children with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury are at risk of developing cognitive-communication disorder. This can bring devastating effects on the child’s school life, family life, and social life. It can result in memory loss, problem-solving skills, or listening.
Dysarthria
It is characterized by slow or slurred speech due to weakness or inability to control the speech muscles. Facial paralysis or throat and tongue weaknesses can cause it as it is directly associated with nervous system disorder and conditions.
Consulting an Expert
Visiting an expert at a psychiatry clinic will conduct your child’s speech assessment. It will help identify the type of communication disorder that exists. Based on that, certain speech therapies will come into play.
These are specially-crafted exercises and activities where the child can interact and play, using illustrated books, pictures, and other objects. These also include modal correct sounds, and syllables to practice the sounds and pronunciations. The classes are more focused, in small groups or one-to-one-depending upon the speech nature.
Final Thoughts
Speech therapy certainly works and the success rate varies from disorder level to age group. Younger age groups tend to recover faster if they have mild conditions. The severity of these conditions can worsen the mental and neurological health of your child. Visiting a reliable speech therapy clinic or psychiatry in Dubai, will help you through with the required speech therapy sessions and ensure quick recovery for your child. This guarantees that your child is adequately able to float the message across.
