Baby Babble Or A Sign Of Speech Problems

Main Category: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Article Date: 31 Oct 2007 - 4:00 PST

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From the moment they begin to speak, any proud parent will tell you that they hang on every word their baby says. What if those first few words are hard to come by? Or worse, what if they are consistently hard to understand? It might just be a normal phase as your baby learns to talk. But it could be a sign of something more serious - a growing problem known as childhood apraxia of speech.

3 year old Molly Stevens chats away while she plays. But getting her to communicate clearly took a lot of hard work. Her mom, Melanie, says it was clear early on that Molly had trouble turning thoughts into words.

"Between 14 and 18 months is really when I started noticing it. She wasn't saying her first word, wasn't babbling a lot before all that and it just gave me a clue something wasn't quite right," says Melanie.

Even when Molly did start speaking, it didn't sound right, but for Melanie it did sound familiar. Just two years ago, her son went through the same thing. Both kids were diagnosed with apraxia of speech, in which the words are there, but not always clear.

"For instance, 'Mama' might just be 'ah-ah', 'thank you' might be 'ah-oo.' So you kind of figure out what the child is saying, but the consonants are totally missing," says Christina Doelling, a speech pathologist at Nationwide Children's Hospital. Doelling says doctors aren't sure what causes apraxia of speech, but cases appear to be on the rise* and the only way to control it is through intense therapy.

So what signs should you be listening for? Experts say if your child isn't using words consistently by age 2, take note. Speaking only in vowels, or struggling with even simple words can also be warning signs. The problem is all kids struggle as they learn to speak, and many parents wait for them to simply outgrow it.

"While that's very understandable, we want to see if this really is going to be a problem if the kid won't outgrow it. What we really want is to see those kids as soon as we can and help them as soon as we can," says Doelling.

If apraxia of speech isn't addressed early in children, it can lead to serious speech and learning problems later in life. Scientists are now trying to determine if it's a genetic condition or if it's related to the brain's inability to tell the mouth how to move.**

*Childhood Apraxia of Speech, Technical Report 2007, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, http://www.asha.org
**Apraxia of Speech, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health, http://www.nidcd.nih.gov