Will Your Child “Outgrow” Speech Errors?

I'll get straight to the point. So you should wait for speech therapy. In fact, you should seek for speech therapy if your child is not understood by everyone, meaning they have a speech sound errors, they have speech delay or speech sound disorders or so on and so forth. And I just want to tell you exactly that you should be doing therapy. Okay? There is a new study that came out to talk about following children for two and a half years who are on the waiting list. And half of them did catch up without any therapy, just to let you know. Okay? But that doesn't mean that you should be you, you shouldn't be waiting or you shouldn't be doing therapy. I'll explain later on. Okay? My name is Ming, a speech therapist from agents of speech.com and today we're talking about whether your child will outgrow speech errors. Okay? So speech therapy waiting lists are super long, okay? Wherever you are in the world, the wait list is long. It's years on end. And the reason is because our profession is rather new, right? So we're not talking about hundreds of years old like engineering or whatever. So it is rather new. So we, we do need a lot more backlog of people coming in to, to service everyone. Okay? So the most that you can actually see as a speech therapist is around like 40 to maybe 60 children a week. And that would be very tiring. Okay, so all major cities are just like that is on a shortage. And you have to understand that speech cases, we're talking about speech errors, right? Speech and language are different. If you don't know what it is, go check it out in one of our videos in YouTube or Facebook, just search for it. And speech cases are overall, we would say less urgent than treating language cases. Meaning if your child is already capable of talking in words, phrases or even sentences, but they just sound like gibberish, then it's actually of a lower priority because we would think, oh, it's a speech case. Therefore we don't need that much intervention because there is a chance that they would, would catch up. And the study I'm going to talk about actually confirms that. Right? So that's why you see speech cases to be. You wait for a very long time and then it's just poof. And maybe by the time, by two years you see them again, they're already okay in terms of that like their speech abilities, but their language abilities might have not caught up. And that's why you do some like some light speech therapy and you don't get as much speech therapy time if you want to. So yes, if you, you're on a waiting list and you can afford it, you should go ahead and try private practice and try to get more services if you can afford it. Right. So let's talk about the study that is from Hong Kong, recently published. I'm from Hong Kong, so yay. So it's following kids who didn't get therapy on a waiting list for two and a half years. So the gist of it, what I got from it is number one, most children by six and a half, they will have the median time for everyone, for everyone in the world. Me, you, whatever. The median time is six and a half from birth. Right? To complete the mother tongue or the language that they speak, the phonetic infantry. So what is a phonetic infantry? It just means all the speech sounds within a language. So for instance, I'm, I speak Cantonese English. And we don't have the trill, the R, trill, that is not in our inventory. So therefore I don't need to learn that. Right? But we do have L's, we do have Y's, we do have a lot of things that share with English. The phonetic inventory is similar. So inventory is all the sounds there. So if I was a Cantonese, I am a Cantonese speaker, I don't need to learn the R sound. The trill. Right, the trill. R. Okay, that's not inside. So to complete all of it, there are different types of consonant in different languages. So for your mother tongue, you can just search on Wikipedia and look at alphanetic inventory for, I don't know, Mongolian or something, and you'll see a whole bunch of, you know, those, those phonetic symbols that you see in dictionaries. So it takes around six and a half years. Okay. Sorry for the long winded explanation. And in this study, it shows that half of these children who started in this study that's two and a half years old did resolve their, those errors that they had by six and a half. So half of them did. All right, so you have a 50, 50% chance. And how do you know more? Okay, there are two points. Number one, the kids who are more stimulable, that's a word meaning that if you teach them a word like let's say they're missing the, the S sound. And whenever they say like stop, they say like that. If you can stimulate that S meaning, if you tell them to go like that using various verbal cues, like visual cues, whatever, tactile cues, just, just therapy stuff, if you're able to stimulate them, then it's actually 17% more likely that they would actually normalize. In this case, I think it's fair to say normalize because it is bell curve. You know, when we're learning anything in the world, it's just like that, the performance of everyone in the world. So to normalize the place where they are able to speak and adult clarity is that if they're, if they're stimulable, it's actually 70% more likely that they will. They won't need the therapy. Right. They will get to it anyways. Okay. That second thing I want to talk about is called intelligibility screener. And I have a link for that down below. It's just a questionnaire to know how intelligible, meaning how much you're someone can understand your child without subtitles. Right. And without you translating. Yeah. And that's those who have passed that screener, meaning they're okay, they are 23% more likely to normalize and did so faster. Right. So these two things, the stimulability and intelligibility, starting off of the child will actually help predict if they will actually normalize their speech errors in the long run. So around six and a half. So in the long run, Right. So the stimulability thing, you can try it yourself. But most of all, that's actually what we do in our articulation test, right. If I were to see a kid, I would do a bunch of all of that. What I was saying, right, I would do the articulation test by itself. So in Cantonese, it's called the Hong Kong cat. You know, Cantonese articulation test, that's cat. And then English, there's a whole bunch of them. So you, you know, like, there's a lot more to choose from. So there's a standardized test that, you know, looking at pictures, going through the pronunciation, marking down errors and so on. So I do that. Number two is like, I'll try to like to deep test. I think that's what we call it. So we see the level of a linguistic level of how the sound. Is it apparent in a single word? Right. If we put the sound in the middle of the word, will it affect the production of it? If we only do like by isolation, like if we're doing S, that's an isolation because of isolating the sound. If we do that, does it actually help? Can the child actually say it? If they cannot hack, how can we stimulate? So that's why we, we. We do a stimuli test when we're doing articulation examination. Right. So we do this anyways so you'll understand. You can talk to your therapist and they can tell you, oh, look, they're not doing well in these eras, but at the same time, they're stimulable in these sounds. And we can go as far to, like, single words for these sounds that he cannot do in a conversational level. Right. So this is what, as a therapist like me, I'm supposed to tell you at the end of the examination. And number four is quite surprising to me in the study. So having atypical errors or lower expressive language abilities did not make kids less likely to normalize meaning if they had some very atypical. So atypical is. Is language dependent, right? It depends on the culture, the society, the way that people say sounds in a particular place on earth, you know, so atypical errors, something that can be typical somewhere might be atypical somewhere else. Right. I don't have a certain example for you right now because in my head, I only have atypical errors for both English and Cantonese. Right? And I don't know what language to speak. And plus, the best way is just to speak. See a speech therapist for that said articulation test. Right. And I feel like this is quite new to me as well, because I always thought if it's atypical error, at least that's what they say in the textbooks, is that if it's atypical error, it means it's. It's more disordered and therefore it requires more treatment. Right? Is what how a therapist thinks? Oh, I see. This is rather strange. I would want to do this because it's disordered, out of order. So that's something new to me as well. Right. Given this. What, what. What I've just told you means that, you know, like your chances are you can gauge your chances after seeing a speech therapist for articulation examination, right? Around 50% by default, just through the sample size of their. The sample size of the study in Hong Kong, and that's 82 of them, if you must know. You can. Again, I have the link down below. Right? You can read it yourself. And the other thing is this. Should you wait or not? Okay, so if the. The answer is if it's up to you, then of course you should get therapy. All right, I'll explain. All right. If it's outside your control, then you should look like. If it's outside of control, right. You cannot look for therapy and you can't afford it, then you should look into teaching him or herself by Yourself. Okay, yes, you can wait. In most cases. In most cases, children will improve. Will they normalize? Will they do that? Really? I don't know. Really? Like no one would know? Your kid wouldn't know. You wouldn't know. The therapist wouldn't know? No one knows. All right? And the study shows that by six and a half years old, half of them actually normalize and, and you can actually know your, your chances after doing an articulation examination. However, what I wanted to tell you is that. What about the years in between? Right? What about the years in between? How about if your child was like three and then they had to wait until six and a half just to. Just to normalize and have their speech charity as well as, as us, then that's going to take a toll on the language, you know, on the language development. Now why is that? It's because if a child doesn't feel confident in expressing him or himself in front of strangers and other people, his peers or whatever, and every time he has to be careful and doesn't want to talk and doesn't want to make errors, and he knows that he's making these speech errors, what's that going to do to him is that he's not going to speak as much. And when he's not speaking as much, he's not making as many mistakes as he should be and therefore learning from them, then what happens is a vicious cycle, right? It just becomes harder and harder for them. Like less practice, less confidence, you know, less capability. And whilst others, especially the girls, you know, they talk so much, they don't care. And they talk even if there's no one around and they just become really good at language, right? So the difference can be seen. And especially children, as they get a little bit older and they understand that they can compare, they're like, man, they speak so well. I don't want to talk anymore. Right? So therefore, I really think, because there's no downside to doing articulation training other than it's a little bit boring, as long as you know how to make, make it fun for a kid, then that's fine already, right? So that's what I would say to you. There is a chance that your child will outgrow. In many cases it would. Especially if the trained speech therapist looks at the, the, the error patterns and look at how stimulable the sounds are, chances are that they will. But just it's a matter of when. And the problem is if the time, the time frame, the time horizon is too long, how's that going to affect their social, their language and their overall development as a human being. Right. So that's all I wanted to share today. Okay. If you have any questions, just put it down in the comment section below. And if you haven't, I have something for you. So you can get a free framework for teaching speech sound disorders. You can go to agents of speech.com speech. I have a video for you there to run you through what it means to have different language levels and what it means to have cues and prompts. Okay. So that's all for today's video. See you next week. Bye. Bye.