Speech and language development disorders

A child who has a speech development disorder has trouble expressing themselves verbally or understanding others. Speech development disorders can be grouped into:

• Problems expressing things in spoken language (expressive language disorder): The child takes a lot longer than others to learn to talk or has a small vocabulary. Words are left out or the wrong words for things are used. They might make significant grammar mistakes (mixing up the parts of a sentence, for instance) or find it difficult to express things properly. Many of these children also have problems making specific sounds.
• Problems understanding spoken language (receptive language disorder): The child has trouble understanding what others say to them. This can result in them not following simple instructions or not reacting in the right way.

The expressive and receptive language skills of children who have a speech development disorder are significantly lower than what would be expected of a child of that age.

Over time, these speech problems can improve or disappear completely, especially if they involve pronunciation. Speech issues that persist into adulthood can have a long-term impact. This is particularly true of problems with understanding speech.

Lots of children have low self-esteem and anxiety due to their problems with spoken language. They might also be teased or suffer from stress.

Speech development disorders can increase the risk of reading and writing disorders. In addition, children who have trouble understanding information in spoken form find learning in general more difficult. As well as causing problems in language-related subjects, difficulties can occur in other subjects too. For instance, it’s impossible to answer a math question if you can’t actually understand the question. Learning difficulties can result in the child leaving school with a poor qualification and being restricted when it comes to job choices.

In Germany, the child development check-ups carried out by pediatricians or family doctors can point to a possible disorder. The doctor starts by asking the parents about the child's speech development. This is followed by general speech tests and then additional language tests as needed to check things like pronunciation and how the child uses and understands words and sentences.

But an abnormal result on its own is not enough to provide a reliable diagnosis. This is because the child might just be learning speech at a lower pace than their peers or they might not have cooperated properly in the speech tests due to nervousness. Children from immigrant families also tend to do worse in speech tests that aren’t conducted in their own mother tongue.

Additional tests are needed to tell whether the child has a speech development disorder. These examinations are mostly performed by specialists for speech and voice disorders or hearing disorders in children and sometimes by speech therapists.

As well as assessing the child’s speech development, the doctors assess their mental and emotional development. They also test the child’s hearing because speech problems can sometimes be caused by hearing problems that have gone undetected.

Usually, it’s not possible to diagnose a speech development disorder reliably until the child has turned three.

The following forms of support are available for children with speech development disorders:

• Speech training – at home or at kindergarten, for instance: Good ways to help the child’s language development include regular conversation, and singing with and reading aloud to the child. A lot of kindergartens also offer special speech training programs.
• Speech therapy: This usually involves the child doing age-specific exercises once to twice a week to practice aspects such as pronunciation, breathing, using their voice, expanding vocabulary, sentence formation and grammar. There are also language perception exercises to practice things like hearing the difference between certain sounds. The child is meant to be encouraged so that they become more confident in their own abilities.

In addition, it’s important that parents seek advice on the best way to deal with the child’s impairments and offer support. The child might also need psychological help or psychological therapy to cope with problems in day care or at school. This type of support is especially useful if the child also has behavioral or mental health problems.