Oral Motor Therapy Helps Improve Articulation Disorders in Children Thesis

Oral Motor Therapy Helps Improve Articulation Disorders in Children - Thesis Example The application of oral – motor therapies as one of the most effective alternatives for facilitating enhanced speech acquisition/articulation among young children; has been widely proposed as well as debated by researchers and scholars alike. Articulatory disorders in children are often characterized by difficulties in generating accurate sounds with respect to phonemes or other similar speech sounds. The various types of articulation disorders include omissions – wherein certain sounds, often at the end of word, are omitted / dropped e.g., the word dish is often uttered as just di’; substitutions – wherein a sound is replaced/substituted by another sound, e.g., sh in the word dish is spoken as death; distortions: wherein certain additional sounds are added e.g., dish is uttered as a dish; and additions: wherein certain additional sounds are added at the end of the word e.g., dish is uttered as dish. Â  Such a disorder may be caused on account of several reasons, such as hearing loss – where the child has difficulty in accurately hearing certain sounds or oral motor disorders such as apraxia. The existence of phonological or articulatory disorders among children, alternatively referred to as PADs, is characterized by the occurrence of impediments in verbal communication or disorders other than neurological deficits or organic mutilations1. This paper strives to review, analyze and investigate the various studies/researches in the field of speech-language pathology, particularly in relation to articulatory disorders among children; assess the impact and effectiveness of oral motor therapies on improving and facilitating speech production in children; and justify the relevance and credibility of oral motor therapies as an effective means of improving such impairments through a broad study of historical researches conducted in this behalf. Although there exist several pieces of evidence and credible research conducted by promine nt scholars in the field of speech pathology which substantiate the application and effectiveness of oral motor therapy as a credible alternative of enhancing articulation in children suffering from PADs, there does exist, differing views and contradictions which counter such a hypothesis which are contrary to the research presented in this paper and claim otherwise.