On Friday I attended a Speech and Language Therapy Special Interest Group where a Speech Therapist from DownsEd spoke about the speech and language development of children with Down syndrome. She also gave lots of practical tips on how to help develop a child’s speech and language skills. Over the next few weeks I will discuss some of the literature and advice recommended.

We already know that early intervention is very important in helping our babies with Down syndrome learn. One of the strategies discussed on Friday was how to develop and help build your baby’s repertoire of speech sounds. Traditionally some speech and language therapists would’ve only introduced the early developmental speech sounds to young babies. These sounds usually include consonants like b, p, m, h, w as well as a few vowel sounds like oo, ah and ee. The literature states that during the first year of a typically developing baby’s life the baby develops a full 'sound bank' of all the speech sounds heard in the English language (that is if your baby only hears English at home). Babies usually start making sounds by cooing and making throaty sounds. However, these sounds do not remain in your baby’s sound bank because they are not heard during everyday English, hence these sounds are not reinforced.
The same is true for babies with Down Syndrome. They are also exposed to all the different speech sounds in English on a daily basis, but unlike typically developing babies they do not always develop the full sound bank of sounds in their first years. So, it is up to us to introduce them to our children.

Try the following with your baby (It can be done from about 4 months of age):
Place your baby on your lap and make sure you are face to face. It is very important that your baby can see your mouth. Start making a sound using over exaggerated lip or tongue movements. Say the sound clearly and slightly louder than usual. Go through all the vowel and consonant sounds in English. Make sure you make the sound the letter represent, e.g. the letter B is a 'bih'-sound. Introduce even the tricky sounds like ch, sh, th (as in 'the') and th (as in 'thumb'). Your child needs to hear ALL the sounds. After each sound, wait, to give your child time to imitate. Do not put any pressure on your child to imitate the sound, your child is learning even if he / she is only listening. Try to introduce 10 sounds each week and let your child listen to the same sounds each day for a week before changing to 10 new sounds.

And most important: have fun teaching your child to listen and learn!

© Marinet Van Vuren, DSC  2009

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