According to statistics, the number of children with neurological disorders increased in 2021. Therefore, the number of visits to specialists of different profiles increases, namely a neurologist, a pediatrician, a defectologist, a psychologist, and a speech therapist. In this article we will look at the stages of speech development of children and frequent speech disorders that arise from neurological pathology.

The main stages of speech development:

At 1 to 3 months of age, the child actively communicates through movement and emotion. He has an “animation” complex when communicating with others.

At 3 months, the child reacts to different sounds and turns his head in the direction of the stimulus. It should be noted that a child with a hearing impairment will not have such reactions.

Then, up to 6 months, there is “humming”, which is characterized by the presence of the back-speaking sounds: aha, aha, aka. After “humming,” the babbling stage begins and the baby can make a chain of sounds: pa, ba, ma.

By 8 months, these chains increase and have directionality, so the baby can react emotionally to certain people, repeating syllables after them (ma-ma-ma, ba-ba-ba).

At up to 12 months, the baby learns to say more than four syllables, can repeat them after an adult and change intonation. This is when the first words appear.

In the second year of life, the child begins to actively communicate and consciously pronounce simple words: mama, papa, meow, woof. Can repeat words after an adult, pronouncing the beginning or end of a word (so – dog).

From the third year of life, the baby begins to speak in simple phrases (mama, dai). Later, sentences appear. New prepositional forms are learned (on, in), and the concepts of singular and plural are used. Vocabulary grows rapidly, and the child actively plays with peers.

From the age of four, the child is already actively communicating, and sentences become extended: “Mom and I went to the store. The child is able to generalize, categorize items, and identify the main features. Mistakes are made in sound pronunciation (crayfish-ac, hat-hat, shovel-shovel).

In the fifth year, the child’s vocabulary reaches 1,500-2,000 words. The child uses almost all parts of speech in his or her statements, and very rarely makes mistakes in pronunciation. There is an intensive development of the grammatical structure of words, but mistakes are possible.

By the end of the sixth year, the child’s active vocabulary is from 2,500 to 3,000 words. Statements become more complete and accurate. At the age of six, children compose a narrative independently. Complex sentences appear in the child’s expressions. Most children have already formed sound pronunciation.

It should be noted that speech development is very individual and can deviate from the standards, but not significantly. If a child deviates significantly from the norm, you should consult specialists: a neurologist and a speech therapist. Preventive speech therapist works with children from birth to 3 years old and most of his work is done by parents. From the age of 3 the work is done by a speech therapist-defectologist with the child.

The most common speech disorders found in children with neurological pathology are

Dysarthria is a speech disorder most frequently encountered in children with cerebral palsy and is characterized by impaired innervation of the speech apparatus and a change in muscle tone. In dysarthria, speech development from birth to the rumble stage does not differ from normotypic. Children have an animation complex, an emotional response to adults, and non-speech sounds. The babbling may appear later or may not appear at all. Children have hyper-salivation (secretion of large amounts of saliva), and chewing disorders are possible. If a child begins to speak, most often the speech is slurred, incomprehensible, “squeaky” or rude, the speech exhalation is disturbed, which does not allow the child to finish a word or phrase.

Dyspraxia (from dyspraxis – excitement, praxis – opportunity), that is, it is a violation of the ability to reproduce sequential and purposeful movements according to a given plan (motor planning). Scientists distinguish 4 types of praxis:

General (the ability to reproduce movements of the whole body);
Hand and finger (fine motor skills);
Oral (the ability to reproduce movements with the articulatory apparatus – the ability to blow, “cluck” the tongue, inflate the cheeks;
Articulation (the ability to pronounce phonemes and their series – direct speech).

Articulatory praxis is responsible for expressive speech, that is, the ability to speak. With articulatory dyspraxia, the speech development of children is not significantly different. Parents notice the peculiarities of speech after the age of 3 years, when the child cannot pronounce a word correctly or repeat after an adult. With dyspraxia, the syllabic structure of a word is disturbed, i.e. a child may swap syllables in a word (tree – bucket), add an extra one (deverevo), not pronounce the beginning (yerevo, revo, vo), lose syllables in the middle (devo) or at the end of a word (tree). In dyspraxia, muscle tone is not impaired, there is no hypersalivation, blurred speech may be encountered only when there is a violation of the sensitivity of the articulatory apparatus, which is in no way related to tone. It should be noted that there are children with total impairment of articulatory praxis – apraxia, in which children are unable to speak.

Speech-language agnosia (ASA) is an auditory perception disorder in which a child is unable to recognize speech sounds and differentiate between them.Children with ASA are usually characterized by impaired understanding of addressed speech, atypical changes and replacement of the sound composition of words (dog – tabata, milk – posko), reduced verbal auditory memory. For example, you asked the child to put toys on the table, and cushions on the sofa, and the child put cushions on the table, and toys on the sofa or generally executed one instruction. Decreased auditory attention, when children seem to “fly in the clouds” when completing instructions, or they do not listen and start doing tasks.

In severe forms of ASD, children may not understand addressed speech at all. They have a so-called “bird’s tongue”. Children may not communicate with adults and peers, as if they live in their own world, that is why such children are often confused with children with autism. But it is necessary to remember that they are not characterized by stimulation, stereotypy.

Alalia is usually divided into 2 types: sensory and nimble. Within the framework of the speech approach, sensory alalia is the most severe disorder of children’s speech, in which a child with preserved intelligence and hearing does not begin to understand the language of others and, as a consequence, speak.

Motor alalia is an underdevelopment of expressive language in which there is sufficient understanding of words, but there are difficulties with the use of active vocabulary.

All speech disorders can occur in combination with each other to varying degrees and affect the child’s speech development. That is why timely consultation with a speech therapist and remedial therapy is so necessary.

Corrective work by a speech therapist in our rehabilitation center is built taking into account the peculiarities of each speech impairment and the individual abilities of the child.

Anna Kovalenko, speech therapist at the St. John’s Center, prepared the article