A distinctive symptom of dysarthria is that the problem is not with the pronunciation of certain sounds, and affects all of the pronunciation of speech. This is observed limitation of mobility not only verbal but also mimic muscles. The child’s speech is not fluid, it is indistinct and blurred, and its rate can be accelerated or slowed down. Voice also suffers, which can be harsh, or vice versa, silent, deaf and weak.

The severity and severity of this condition depends largely on the nature of the damage. Despite the fact that dysarthria as a speech disorder has been known since ancient times, even the current methods of therapy do not always allow to fully correct it.

The possibility of recovery depends on a variety of factors. Successful correction of dysarthria requires a comprehensive approach consisting of speech therapy classes, medication, therapeutic exercise and physiotherapy.

Most cases of dysarthria occur in young children. In most cases, this disorder is associated with cerebral palsy. Organic brain tissue damage occurs during fetal development or against the background of various adverse factors that the baby was exposed to before the age of 2 years.

The most common cause of cerebral palsy, which leads to the development of dysarthria in children, is pregnancy pathology such as:

• Fetal hypoxia;
• Toxicosis;
• Rhesus conflict;
• Severe course of childbirth;
• Nuclear jaundice of newborns;
• Asphyxia during birth;
• Prematurity;
• Somatic diseases.

In most cases, children have a mild form of dysarthria – starettia. The degree of severity of this speech impairment is in close correlation with the existing motor disorders. It is known that with double hemiplegia (the most severe form of cerebral palsy), dysarthria is found in the vast majority of children.

Causes of dysarthria in children without cerebral palsy are damage to brain tissue from neuroinfections, severe intoxication, purulent otitis media, craniocerebral trauma, and hydrocephalus.

At an early age, dysarthria may develop against a background of other types of CNS lesions.

The human brain is a highly complex structure, so this speech impairment in different children does not follow the same scenario. Depending on the localization of the damaged area, the following types of dysarthria are distinguished

bulbar;
Pseudobulbar;
Ectrapyramidal;
cerebellar;
cortical.

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Parents of children with speech disorders know firsthand what a speech therapy massage is. With his help, you can not only activate the muscles of the speech apparatus, but also teach your child how to correctly articulate sounds. If the speech organs are ready to work, and complex sounds become easier to pronounce. Moreover, these exercises are good help in cases where children are difficult to pronounce a large number of sounds.

It makes a speech therapist. The list of speech disorders in which the massage is assigned is quite extensive. With delayed speech development and the right approach, it is possible to completely eliminate the problem, if there are no other abnormalities. If the child’s speech lag is significant, parents should be prepared for the fact that it will take a long time to bring the speech to normal.

Logopedic tongue massage helps cope with the following tasks:

Correction of correct sound pronunciation.
Normalization and formation of breathing (diaphragmatic, not upper or clavicular).
Improvement of the condition and quality of the voice and vocal cords.
Strengthening of pharyngeal reflexes.

Normalization of the correct trajectory of the articulation organs.
Parents should be aware that there are a number of contraindications. They are of a temporary nature, and require the occupation to be postponed for some time.

For example, children’s speech therapy massage is not recommended under the following circumstances:

• Elevated temperature;
• Cold or acute respiratory illness;
• Inflammation of the gums;
• Stomatitis;
• Conjunctivitis;
• Lymphatic drainage disorders;
• Enlarged lymph nodes;
• If there is blood in the feces;
• Herpetic infection.

There are other contraindications, but they are all avoidable. As a rule, the massage is simply postponed until they are eliminated.

Peculiarities of the procedure
Before starting the procedure, the speech therapist examines the state of mimic, articulator muscles, general, hand motor skills. He or she determines their condition: whether they are tense or passive, whether there are twitching, asymmetry in the muscles, and, depending on this, selects the appropriate set of exercises. During the massage session, the specialist talks to the parents in detail and shows them the ins and outs of the procedure.

Massage for the development of speech is recommended to do in several cycles, each of which includes 10 sessions. The sessions are done either every day or every other day. The interval between cycles is 1-2 months. If there is no possibility of frequent visits to a speech therapist, it is allowed to increase the distance between sessions.

It is practically meaningless without simultaneously conducting classes for the correction of existing speech disorders. For example, I give speech therapy massages free of charge as part of individual lessons in the correction of pronunciation.

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Without exception, all parents are waiting for the moment when a child starts to speak mommy and daddy. Many people think that children’s speech begins its development on the day when the baby utters the first word. In fact, to make it happen, it takes a long time to prepare the organs of articulation, their coordinated work, the ability to switch, mobility of the lower jaw, lips, tongue, soft palate. It is impossible to say exactly those sounds that make up the first words if the child can not distinguish them from phonemes similar in sound, such as words like cat-kit, hill-crust and others.

In simple terms, speech is produced during the fetal period when the organs of hearing, articulation, and brain structures are formed. These processes are influenced by heredity, diseases that the mother had, the presence or absence of her bad habits, lifestyle of the baby’s parents. The course of birth and the health of the infant are important factors in its successful debut as a person who speaks and thinks.

The age at which a baby should start speaking is individual, but ranges from 8 to 14 months.

Immediately after birth, intensive development of the brain structures begins and new connections between neurons are established. At the same time, the organs of hearing and articulation develop, and physical and phonemic hearing is formed. Without adequate hearing, children cannot learn speech, since the distortion or absence of sound signals to the brain makes it impossible to form speech skills.

In the first weeks and months of life, it is the speech of others that stimulates the initial phase of speech development. The baby listens to the speech of loved ones, he is quiet for a while when he hears his mother’s voice, the impulsive movements of the arms and legs stop for a while. After some more time, he begins to turn his head toward the source of the sound.

Not all moms and dads talk to newborns and infants in the first months of life. They think it is unnecessary because the baby doesn’t understand anything yet. Such one-way “conversations” between parents and babies that accompany bathing and waking develop auditory concentration and a desire to respond. Attentive parents may notice how the child tries to move his lips as if he wants to say something. Even better, if parents often call the baby by name, show him toys and call the child, not moving away from the crib.

These sounds still sound vague and spoken involuntarily. These skills indicate the first stage of speech development – humming. In addition, the baby’s cry at 1-3 months is quite expressive. By the intonation, mom can tell if the baby is bored, wants to eat, or it is time to change a wet diaper, that is, he began to master the intonation.

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There is a significant difference between infantile and adult alalia – in adults there is a disintegration of already formed speech, while in children it occurs due to lesions of the speech cortical areas (Broca’s zone). Such changes occur during intrauterine development or early childhood.

The severity of alalia depends on when the brain is affected. The most severe lesion occurs during intrauterine development, in the 3rd-4th month of gestation. Causes of lesions of the speech areas:

• Maternal intoxication;
• Toxicosis of pregnancy;
• Incompatibility between mother and baby by blood type and Rh factor;
• Birth trauma, asphyxia during intrauterine development and at birth;
• Neuroinfections;
• Profound prematurity;
• Craniocerebral injuries at an early age;
• Consumption of alcohol and nicotine by a pregnant woman;
• Hereditary predisposition.

The bottom line is that organic damage to the brain slows down the process of maturation of nerve cells. This factor contributes to a decrease in the excitability of neurons and reduces the conduction of nerve impulses.

Motor alalia
The fact that both hemispheres of the brain are affected in motor alalia is evidenced by the fact that this pathology is not compensated spontaneously, without special corrective work and medical support. Complex encephalopathic disorders of the cerebral cortex and subcortical structures lie in the ontogenesis of the disorder.

The disease belongs to the third group of clinical types of general underdevelopment of speech, occurs in about 1% of preschool children, 0.6% of school-age children. An officially recorded diagnosis is grounds for disability.

Characteristic signs of alalia are an underdevelopment of absolutely all aspects of speech:

Phonetics;
Vocabulary;
Syntax;
Morphology.

It is called motor (expressive) alalia because it is based on the insufficiency of the motor part of speech. Electroencephalopathic examination of children with motor alalia diagnoses local lesions of cortical tissues as well as hypothalamus, subcortical ganglia, optic ganglion, brainstem. In most cases, there is dysfunction of the midbrain structures.

In motor alalia, the child may have an extensive passive vocabulary, but has difficulty naming even familiar words. Children cannot repeat even simple words after an adult, even though they have a developed articulatory apparatus. In words, they rearrange and replace syllables, omit sounds. These replacements are not stable, in some circumstances, children perform a syllable replacement, in others – replace sounds in the same word.

It is especially difficult for them to pronounce words expressing abstract concepts and generalization words. Children with alalia are aware of their deficiency. A child with high intelligence is more critical about his or her speech and he or she replaces words with facial expressions and gestures when communicating with others.

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At the age of 4, speech of a preschooler normally reaches the peak of its activity when the first word is uttered. Not without reason, four-year-olds are called “geeks” – they are constantly and persistently asking questions, reasoning, using sometimes their own logic, inventing their own words, actively communicating with their peers and adults.

Lack of speech at age 4 not only signals a malfunction in the central nervous system, but can also be the cause of delayed mental development.

At this age, differences in a child’s speech skills begin to show. One child clearly pronounces almost all the sounds of the native language, recites many rhymes, retells stories, skillfully using intonation, and the other has not mastered any hissing or sonorous consonants and has difficulty answering simple questions.

Nevertheless, in both cases – these are variants of the norm. This variation in the speech development of children with the same abilities is the influence of the family and being in a children’s group.
Signs of normal speech development of a four-year-old child:

He clearly articulates his thoughts with up to 2,500 words in his active vocabulary. It is noticeable that his speech is more precise and richer compared to the speech between the ages of 3 and 4.
He can name the main features and properties of objects, using adjectives for this purpose, reflects in speech the connections between phenomena.
The child becomes more attentive and can listen to the end of the adult’s response to his or her questions, which are pouring out of the child’s mouth in a continuous stream.
The four-year-old child’s statements consist of simple sentences, but he or she can also use complex constructions.
He is capable of a short monologue, for example, telling his parents about what happened to him during the day in kindergarten, retelling a short text or a read fairy tale.
The grammatical design of statements may not be perfect – words do not agree with each other in gender and number, verbs do not change correctly, difficulty in coordinating numerals with nouns, etc.
There was a period of rhyming words and creating our own “poems. These naive rhyming 2-4 verses amuse children and develop their sense of melodic native speech.

Signs of delayed speech development
The structure of speech defects at this age is varied; virtually no two cases of speech delay are the same. If a child is silent at 4 years old – this is a reason for an urgent examination of the child by a psychoneurologist, neurologist, otolaryngologist, speech therapist and speech therapist. Children may not speak at all, or may be slurred and slurred.

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All of this fully applies to speech – correction of its underdevelopment by a speech therapist should begin after the age of 2.5. If a child is 6 years old and does not speak, then it is a big problem, because it is unlikely that he will cope with the elementary school program until the correction work is done.

Perhaps the speech development defect is so complex that it is impossible to give a prognosis for learning in an educational institution. Simply put – the material that you will have to master for a long time at 6 years old, 2-3 years ago you could have mastered with much less effort, and you should only regret the lost time.

Nevertheless, in cases not complicated by neuropathological symptomatology, even at 6 years can make significant progress in improving children’s speech.

To assess the degree of deviation from the age norm, you need to know how developed the child’s speech at 6 years. In 1-2 years before school it reaches a certain perfection, if the adults paid special attention to it.

Speech skills of 6 year old children are normal:

The vocabulary is large enough, the child uses words of different parts of speech, he has a sufficient stock of knowledge about objects and phenomena of the surrounding world.
Grammatical errors (use of prepositions, agreement of nouns with numerals, case changes, agreement of words by gender and number, etc.) are rare.
Sentences are composed of compound and compound sentences.
All native speech sounds except “R” are pronounced clearly and correctly.
He can control the tempo and volume of his speech and uses intonation appropriately.
He answers questions with detailed phrases, can retell a story, compose his own story, fairy tale, make up a story based on pictures.
Can classify, generalize concepts, find extra objects.

Possible causes of speech disorders
The range of speech impairments of a poorly spoken child at age 6 is large, and the structure of the defect is extremely varied.

If a child speaks poorly at age 6, we may be talking about the following speech disorders:

• Dyslalia;
• Motor and sensory alalia;
• Aphasia;
• Rhinolalia;
• Dysarthria;

Only a qualified specialist, such as a child neurologist, psychoneurologist, speech therapist, can make a diagnosis based on the results of the examination. They will also offer recommendations for medication and pedagogical correction of the speech defect.

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