Child aged 5years/ male was diagnosed with receptive expressive language delay secondary to down’s syndrome has been attending speech therapy sessions since 5 months
When the child was assigned to me, as an initial step I had gone through the case file and I found that he was having many difficulties like poor oral strength which include reduced range of tongue movements and reduced Intra oral breath pressure . As a result his verbal communication was limited. I observed that the child was using gestures and a picture book to communicate his needs.
Initially, I tried to build rapport with the child and started doing oral strengthening exercise using honey, straw and horn . Simultaneously I tried production of bilabial sounds(/p/, /m/,/b/) in isolation .Good verbal praising was given as reinforcement. Once the child started producing bilabial sound in isolation I combined the sound and then the child started producing bysillable meaningful words(map, pipe). As the intervention progressed the child started labelling bysillabic words and his prompt dependency has reduced. At present the child is able to label more than 70 bysillabic words without any help.
Next aim was to make use of his verbal production functionally. It was a difficult task because the child was highly dependent on gestures but with the help of mother child uses his production in day to day life meaningfully and he started shifting his mode of communication to verbal mode.
I am sincerely happy for this lovely child. I also want to use this opportunity to thank Childs mother who was really hardworking throughout the intervention process for her child.
Clerin Jolly
Speech language pathologist
