Ming explains who to contact first if you suspect your child has a speech delay: usually a doctor or psychiatrist. Speech-language pathologists assess whether the problem is articulation (how sounds are made) or language (what the child is trying to say and how they use gestures).
I just want you to know your first contact is that is either a doctor or a psychiatrist. After that, usually speaking, if it's a language delay, you're going to see someone like me, a speech therapist. So a speech therapist is going to perform an assessment to see if it's a speech or a language problem. The speech problem is the sounds are coming out of my mouth right now. That's speech. And speech sounds are like the pronunciations of the sounds. So if I'm saying certain sounds wrong or I'm not saying it in a particular correct way or manner, and that would be a speech problem. Language is. You can hear the sounds coming out from my mouth and you understand my message. The message itself is language. So I might supplement with some gestures if I'm telling you some concepts like big and small, my hands here doing the gestures are also part of language. So speech therapists for myself or speech language pathologist in the in the United States, our job is to see these things and recommend you a course of action.
