Supporting speech development in the early years

Overview

This module has been written to encourage you, as a parent, carer or teacher, to make a carefully planned effort to accelerate your child’s speech, language and communication skills. We hope that you have found the checklists and the games and activities useful and relatively easy to use. We realise that we have provided a large amount of information and have asked you to spend some weeks learning about communication and assessing your child in order to make use of the programme.

We have included this amount of information and detailed guidance because we think it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of speech and language development for every aspect of your child’s social and mental development. Please let us know how helpful or difficult that you have found this module and please contact us if you need further help.

What we do not want to do is make parents anxious, therefore, do remember that you are helping your child to progress all day everyday, as you talk naturally to them. Remember to speak clearly and to encourage eye-contact with your child in these everyday conversations. They need to be looking and listening. They will also be helped by visual cues in sign or picture. Remember also that background noise will make listening much more difficult for them if they have any hearing loss. Small rooms help, turn off the TV and radio at home and sit children near the front of the class in school. If you do these things, your child will benefit and if you can use even some of the ideas in this module, then they will benefit a little more.

Speech and language therapy

It is clear that children with Down syndrome will benefit from speech and language therapy from birth to adulthood. In many countries, this will not be a possibility, and parents will need to use these materials without expert help. Parents in this situation might find working together in a small group helpful.

Ideally, in ‘developed’ countries where these services are available, speech and language therapy should be offered on an individual basis at home in the first months of life, as parents are adjusting to the new baby, and may have many questions to ask. However, in our experience, offering group sessions can be a very effective way to support parents and children in the preschool years. In a group, parents benefit from the opportunity to share their experiences and gain information and emotional support from one another. Group services are cost effective and make good use of professional time, especially as speech and language therapists are often a scarce resource. From 18 months of age, children with Down syndrome are capable of ‘working’ in a group and they benefit from the social interaction and the models provided by the other children.

The way in which services are offered obviously depends on the availability of speech and language therapists, but ideally a weekly or fortnightly service should be the minimum provided for children with Down syndrome from 12 months to five years of age. In groups, the therapist can model the activities for parents and carers to continue at home. The therapist can also give individual advice to parents or carers. Communication is an all day, every day activity and parents need encouragement and activities to practice, regardless of the rate of progress, so that short courses, such as 6 weekly session, and then a break, is not the best model to use. The aim of expert therapy should be to assist the parents to become the experts, by setting appropriate targets with them for speech, language and communication work, and then modelling effective activities and interactions for them, to enable them to help their child all day, every day, during ordinary daily routines and through planned play and teaching.

It is important that therapists have some specialist training and knowledge of the specific needs of children with Down syndrome, and access to the research literature and appropriate resources. Experience of working with children with moderate to severe learning difficulties is not an adequate basis for working with children with Down syndrome.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all of the children, families and colleagues that they have had the privilege to work with and learn from over a period of 20 years. In particular, they would like to record their thanks to Patricia Le Prevost, Specialist Speech and Language Therapist, who provided most of the games illustrated and from whom they have learned a great deal that they hope is accurately reflected in this publication.

The authors would also like to thank Patricia Le Prevost, Ben Sacks and Leela Baksi for their helpful comments on various drafts of this module and the checklists. However, the responsibility for the final content, and any errors, is solely that of the authors.

Terminology

The term ‘learning difficulty’ is used throughout this module as it is the term currently in common use in the United Kingdom. The terms ‘mental retardation’, ‘intellectual impairment’, and ‘developmental disability’ are equivalent terms, used in other parts of the world.

In this module, we have adopted a straightforward and direct style in which the reader is addressed in the first person. They have done this because the module is mainly concerned with practical activities and instructions, and we have found that this direct, active style has been appreciated by readers in previous publications.

References

1. The Hanen Programme. Toronto, Canada: The Hanen Centre.
2. Le Prevost, P. (1990). See and Say. Stourport-on-Severn, England: TFH.
3. Johansson, I. (1994). Language development in children with special needs. London, England: Jessica Kingsley.
4. Passy, J. (1993). Cued articulation and cued vowels. Ponteland, UK: STASS.
5. Nuffield Centre Dyspraxia Programme. London, England: The Nuffield Hearing and Speech Centre.
6. Kumin, L., Councill, C., and Goodman, M. (1994). A longitudinal study of the emergence of phonemes in children with Down syndrome. Journal of Communication Disorders, 27(4), 293-303.
7. SpeechViewer for Windows [Computer Software]. (1998). Armonk, NY, USA: IBM Corporation.
8. Cholmain, C. N. (1994). Working on phonology with young children with Down syndrome a pilot study. Journal of Clinical Speech and Language Studies, 1, 14-35.
9. Kumin, L. (1994). Communication Skills in Children with Down Syndrome: A guide for parents. Bethesda, MD, USA: Woodbine House.
10. Schwartz, S. and Heller Miller, J. E. (1996). *The new language of toys - Teaching communication **skills to special needs children*. Bethesda, MD, USA: Woodbine House.
11. Newmand, S. (1999). Small steps forward. London, England: Jessica Kingsley.
12. Manolson, A. (1992). It takes two to talk. Toronto, Canada: The Hanen Centre.