Parents usually count on teachers or doctors to let them know if their child has a problem. However, your child will not have any teachers until he is three years old, and that is only if he can get into Head Start or another preschool program. As many reservations have waiting list, your child may not have a regular teacher until age four or five. Doctors see children for less than half an hour, once or twice a year. If your child is an Early Childhood Tracking Program, screening should identify language problems, but nothing is 100% accurate. As a parent, you should consider having your child tested by a speech pathologist if you see any of the following signs.
- Your child is not talking by the age of two years.
- His speech is largely unintelligible after the age of three.
- He is leaving off many consonants after the age of three.
- He is still not using two- to three-word sentences by the age of three.
- Developmental screening tests show that sounds are more than a year late in appearing in his speech.
- He uses mostly vowel sounds.
- His word endings are consistently missing after the age of five.
- His sentence structure is noticeably incorrect at the age of five.
- He is embarrassed by his speech problems.
- He is noticeably nonfluent after the age of six.
- He is making speech errors other than /wh/ after the age of seven.
- His voice is a monotone, too loud, too soft, or of a poor quality.
- His voice quality is too high or too low for his age and sex.
- He sounds as if he were talking through his nose or as if he has a cold.
- His speech has abnormal rhythm, rate, and inflection after the age of five.
(From: Teach Your Child to Talk by David Pushaw.)
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