Any tricks up your sleeve for encouraging speech for children with low oral muscle tone (Down syndrome)? Also, I'd like apraxia explained in layman's terms. A speech therapist kind of casually threw that out at me recently as a possible reason for the difficulty in reproducing sounds and I don't really know much about it.
I'll address the first question in this post...
'Low oral muscle tone'---we'll start with the word "tone"...'tone' is your muscle's resistance to stretch. For example, if i flex my arm the muscles on the opposite side of my bicep are also contracting to keep me from over-flexing my arm. I was unfortunately born with lower tone (think of bread dough) than my sister-in-law who has very high tone (tight muscles).
So when a child has low oral muscle tone it means that his/her oral muscles are not resisting the flexing of other muscles and it often leads to open mouth posture and forward tongue carriage, along with delayed speech & language.There are a lot of oral motor exercise programs out there that swear you need to blow a series of whistles and bite on blocks to improve muscle tone for speech. I could give you a long list of references of studies that show doing oral motor exercises does NOT improve speech. So my recommendation is to not do oral motor exercises to improve speech in children with low muscle tone.
I had one graduate school teacher who told me that increasing tone does not lead to improved speech. She stated that she has had kids with low tone who can talk.
However, if a child has issues with eating and has limited tongue mobility (moving your tongue around your mouth) then he/she may need to do some "exercises" to improve oral motor function for the purposes of eating.
So my tip for working on speech with children who exhibit low tone is to work on talking! My experience in working with kids with Down Syndrome is motivating them to speak. Finding something that motivates them.
It is true that a large portion of kids with Down Syndrome also have Childhood Apraxia of Speech. It is the apraxia that may be the primary issue making production of speech difficult and the low tone compounds the problem.
In my next post i will define and discuss Childhood Apraxia of Speech (it's my specialty and i want to make sure to do it justice!)...sorry for the suspense!
Let me know Beth if you have any follow-up questions regarding "low tone"
2 comments:
thanks! That really answered a lot of my questions and confirmed some of my suspicions too that some of that stuff we were being told to do in the beginning wasn't really all that useful!
I saw the link on your sidebar and did a little reading about apraxia. Jude has been much more willing just since he started preschool in Jan. to at least try to vocalize instead of just using sign language or whining and pointing! His articulation is terrible, but at least trying is a start. In general, he has an "eager to please" disposition, so that should come in handy!
So... Caleb has always had low muscle tone - everywhere, not just his mouth. And he definitely had an open mouth and "forward tongue carriage" (I think I would just call it "his tongue hanging out all the time. :)). But the tongue thing seems to have gone away, except for very rare occasions, and his language development seems to be well within the range of normal.
So this might not be a question for a speech pathologist, but...
Do you know of any other causes besides Down's for low muscle tone, oral or otherwise? Just curious.
Post a Comment