Do you or someone you know have a speech sound disorder? If your child is unable to say some words and sounds correct, then he/she must have speech sound disorder. When you speak, you require phonological knowledge. You need your tongue, lips, and jaw to coordinate with your vocal cords and breathing to talk and produce sound.
The children who have a speech sound disorder struggle with the phonological knowledge, and they also struggle with coordinating the movements required for producing speech sound.
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The primary issue that arises with the communication disorder is the child having it struggle in Their academic, occupational, and social life.
The Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM)
DSM is a guidebook. The first edition of the book is from the year 1952. The psychiatric association revises it in few years and makes an addition in it.
Currently, the 5th edition is in use, and this publication is from 2013. DSM-5 is the latest edition of the book. It covers many topics from anxiety, narcissistic personality disorder, speech disorder, Eating disorder, and various other mental disorders.
The DSM has categories for each disorder, with what the diagnostic criteria include, guidelines from psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and health professionals, and symptoms of the disorders.
Symptoms
According to the DSM-5, the following are the symptoms of speech sound disorder:
- The first symptom is, the effects of speech sound disorder will show in earlier stages when a child starts speaking.
- A child with speech sound disorder will suffer from omission, substitution, distortion, and phoneme addition. These complications will get in the way with your speech mostly.
- Children who have speech sound disorder mostly struggle in social, occupational, and academic environments. These kids tend to speak lesser than others.
- The symptoms which show on a person with speech sound disorder will not show on a person with some other neurological and medical condition patient, even people with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).
- Speech sound impaired children will develop partial disorder by the age of two, and when they reach the age of 4, most of their speech will be intelligible.
Child Mind Institution has also given a few more symptoms for speech sound disorder, which include:
- The child will make the wrong sound instead of the right ones, which makes the speech sound distorted.
- The person will make nasal sounds, or they will have a sudden change in their speech, in terms of loudness and pitch. The change in sound also makes it more difficult to understand the speech.
- Kids with the disorder might also run short on their breath while talking.
Causes
There are many causes of speech sound disorder. All the cases differ from one, so you cannot understand the exact reason for the communication disorder.
In most cases, the child who has the disorder has a family member with the same disorder. So, you can say the genetics of a person is the cause in most cases.
Treatment
The most effective treatment for speech sound disorder is speech and language therapy. The therapy will consist of exercises in which the pathologist will help the patient recognize various words and sounds.
The pathologist will show the child various tongue and lips movements so that he learns to make the sounds correctly. It is the perfect way to treat the disorder and develop phonological skills.
Speech sound disorder treatment is a process, so it will take time for the child to perfect their speech. Over time, with practice, the child will learn to speak clearly without any difficulty. However, the speech disorder prognosis is a very slow process, and the treatment will not work in one go. So, you need to target specific parts of speech at one time.
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Final Thoughts
A speech disorder is a communication disorder condition in which a person struggles with producing sound for certain words. Speech disorder also comes in the category of phonological disorder, articulation disorder, and neurological disorder. In all the speech disorders is the most common.
Speech sound disorder affects your social, professional, and academic life. Since the person is struggling with speech, they tend to talk less.
Speech disorder creates disfluency of speech, and it also creates a barrier for other people to understand what you are saying. You can fix your communication with a lot of practice and patience.
Call the Misophonia cognitive center today and start managing and treating your sound disorder.
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