Speech and Language in Dyspraxic Child

[MonsoonMum]

My son has dyspraxia and although he has loads of difficulties in many domains, his single biggest challenge is with speech. He appears not to have any particular disorder but yet he finds putting together sentences immensely difficult as well as grammer etc. Has anyone a child in a similar position and is there anything you do that you find useful? We do speech and language, although not as often as I'd like. I'm just at a loss as to what to do next.

Have you asked the speech and language therapist for their opinion, on why his sentences are disordered grammatically? That is where I would start; if no clear answer from them; I would seek an assessment from an independent SALT of his language.

DD’s sentences were all in the wrong order - this was partly due to her problems with sequencing and partly she had a syntactic disorder, due to an auditory processing disorder. That is not to say this is what your DC has - its just one example of what could cause these type of problems.

My daughter had articulation problems which were fairly easily resolved, but also has a lot of issues like you describe with her speech. From what her speech therapist says it's quite common in dyspraxics - it's planning, sequencing, motor planning - none of which are areas people with dyspraxia tend to find to be their strong points!

We've spent a lot of time working on sequencing and working memory as well as some of the grammatical issues she found really hard (for ages and ages she wouldn't use "she" as a pronoun and her verb tenses were all wonky - and she's cracked them) - but it's taken us doing homework every day and fortnightly speech therapist sessions to get there and her speech is still somewhat a work in progress at times... and giving her time to structure her response and extend what she's trying to tell you.

I'm actually going back to uni to train as a SALT this year and the interview answer they loved was me emphasising how you can feel like you're slogging away and getting nowhere and you sometimes forget to look back and see how far you've come. I'm fairly sure we'll get there in the end with DD2! (I have to mentally slap myself to remind myself of this at times)