Posted at 9:00 a.m.
Edith Fraser is concerned that her 18-month-old grandson is “not saying words clearly” – not even mum and dad, she says. He understands what is said to him, reproduces gestures and babbles a lot, which allows those close to him to have a very good interaction with him. “Should we think about consulting a speech therapist now or do you think it can be resolved in the coming months? “, she asks us.
“Up to the age of 2, there is great variability in the language development of children,” says Marie-Pier Gingras, speech therapist and doctoral student in speech therapy at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières (UQTR).
PHOTO PROVIDED BY MARIE-PIER GINGRAS
Marie-Pier Gingras, speech therapist
Some will thus find themselves in the group of “late speakers”, those children who “take time before starting to speak” – without ever needing intervention. “And there is another group of children who are going to be in difficulty in the longer term and who will not recover from their delay”, she adds, indicating that developmental language disorder (DDL) affects 7.5% of the population in Quebec.
Difficult, however, to determine the group to which a child belongs, despite the many studies carried out on the subject…
Are the parents or someone around this child worried? It remains a very valid indicator to say that it is worth going to consult.
Marie-Pier Gingras, speech therapist
If we rely on the average, an 18-month-old child should be able to say around fifty words. But beware: there are many more words that “count” than you might think.
“If the child always says ‟toto” for boat, for example, we will still count that as a word because it is a sequence of sounds that the child always associates with the same idea. And this count also includes onomatopoeia or interjections like “oh oh” – “because it has meaning for the child”, specifies the speech therapist. “There are parents who say that their child does not say words, but after that, you realize that he is making 12 animal noises! We want to strengthen all these associations. »
From gestures to words
Communication begins very early in the infant, which indicates to its parent, by a simple nod of the head, that it no longer wants to eat. Then he starts pointing and gesturing. “When children are able to say words, they will quickly realize that it is more advantageous for them to speak than to make a gesture”, emphasizes Marie-Pier Gingras.
At a young age, the speech therapist will then help the child to “enter into language” by exploring his fields of interest. “If he likes to play ball, while we’re playing, we try to say ‘throw’ or ‘to me’ a lot. They have to be paying words, that is to say that the child will want to use. And when I say a lot, it can be 30, 40 times in the game so that it really becomes very clear for the child. »
Marie-Pier Gingras also advises parents to allow the child a sufficiently long response time – at least five seconds. “In an everyday conversation, there are never silences because there would be too much discomfort; someone is going to speak. And often, with the child who speaks little, the adult will want to fill in these gaps, which means that the child has less room to speak. »
If, at the age of three and a half, the child must be understood by strangers, he should be able to produce all the sounds at the age of 5, even if there may remain a minority who are not quite acquired. At the same time, learning happens at lightning speed at this age, she recalls.
The objective is that once at school, the child will be able to use language to acquire knowledge (because language feeds cognition, specifies the speech therapist), but also to develop his social relations. .
Calling all
Are you a parent or grandparent of a preschooler and you want to tell us about a question that concerns you? Write to our journalist, we will try to answer it with the help of an expert.