That's a good question to ask. Oral Motor is, in my opinion, an area of Speech and Language Therapy that gets frequently under-assessed. This leads to children being under-diagnosed with oral-motor difficulties. Therefore, this leads to under-treatment of oral motor difficulties. The worst thing is, just because it's not an area many therapists choose to study further or develop into specialisms, if impaired, oral-motor skills will have a knock-on effect on both feeding AND speech. It is like trying to build a house starting with the walls, adding the roof, windows, doors etc., but ignoring the need to first look at foundations. Oral-motor skills include the muscles of the jaw, lips and tongue. In infant development, the jaw is the first to gain strength, stabilise and allow for chewing to develop. Next come the lips and the speech sounds that go with them - think mama or baba. Lip skills also help an infant to drink from a cup and then from a straw, or to blow bubbles and give kisses. The lips and jaw should begin to separate their movements, allowing a child to drink without biting down on the cup or the straw. Finally, the finest motor movements are given to the tongue - responsible for many many speech sounds. Oral motor difficulties are common in the following conditions: Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Verbal Dyspraxia and Autism. To find out more, we recommend a visit to www.talktools.com or look up some clips on youtube. Send us an email if you have any questions or would like an assessment.
No comments:
Post a Comment