speech delay or disorder

[Phoenix4725]

can someone explain the differance please as im really confused and im wondering if my son has more than a delay as is unable to make anything othern than 4 or 5 sounds none of them words and his understanding is lower as well

My understanding is that with a delay, the child will catch up at some point and is just behind with certain skills (e.g. speech) whereas a disorder is more of a disturbance that has a more uncertain prognosis.

When I asked NHS SALT about this recently, she said that 1)the criteria for diagnosing speech disorder vary from area to area, and 2)that in my area the criteria are that speech/language have developed in an abnormal way and that speech/language is at least 2 standard deviations below normal for that age. I was told that DS who is approx 12 months behind in language at 4 is probably not behind enough to get a diagnosis of speech disorder.

I don't think that a diagnosis of speech disorder rather than delay will make much difference to the help/therapy kids recieve though.

Other things you might want to look into are whether it might be appropriate to use pecs (Picture Exchange System) or makaton - these are AAC (alternative augmentative means of communication) that help develop communication and understanding alongside speech - as they use visual supports they can be very useful for some kids with language problems. If no help is available with PECs or Makaton via official channels, you might want to try doing a bit of baby signing or makaton - sing and sign dvds are good, and something special on CBeebies is very good.

apologies - I see from your other thread that you been trying to use makaton for quite some time with your DS.

Ds1 has a speech/language disorder as part of his ASD. If we ask him to "tell us what you did today" he replies with "what you did today". If he wants some food he'll either say "need some hungry" or "what do you want?" If he wants to go in the lifts in our local shopping centre he'll say "go a number 20, down a number 4" or "we go a number 20". He can recite poems and tell stories but struggles still with using language for communication. He's reached the point now of being able to say what he's doing or what he can see, but he's never said if he's tired or cold or if he's had a bad dream. If you asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up he couldn't tell you, but he could read all numbers up to 100 and read several words. He'll ask questions but he'll ask them for things he knows the answer to and ask them over and over (eg "where we going?" several times after being told where we're heading, or saying "what's that?" to a cat. To my mind a language disorder is when verbal speech is present, but the means and amount of verbal communication differ significantly from the average of people the person's age.