A 5-year-old child who does not speak well is synonymous with not pronouncing certain sounds correctly. From this age on, it is synonymous with concern and the best evaluation has it a speech therapist to be able to make an intervention and a speech correction.
When a child has reached the age of maturity to be able to speak correctly and does not may be due to dyslalia. In this case the child speaks with rag language and it is difficult for us to understand what he wants to communicate to us when he mispronounces some sounds. Parents must take our son to a specialist to intervene in a treatment, since at the age of 4 a child should understand practically everything.
Why is my 5 year old son not pronouncing well?
When your 5-year-old does not pronounce certain sounds correctly, omits words or substitutes sounds for others, we are talking about dislalia. But this is not the only problem that can affect other children can present dysglossia. This disorder is due to not being able to pronounce correctly due to a physical alteration: when the lip does not appear completely closed, the palate is damaged or the lingual frenulum appears.
Other setbacks that may arise is when there are problems with otitis or hearing loss, here the child has not learned the sounds correctly and it affects his pronunciation. There are children who also have stuttering, dysphonia (loss of the normal timbre of the voice) or dyslexia. All these factors cannot be missed, because at this age the child already begins with reading and writing and leads to a much worse problem.
Pronunciation problems in children
We have talked about dyslalia as one of the main reasons. The evolutionary dyslalia is developed during the development phase and here you already start to use incorrectly the phonoarticulator device. The functional dyslalia represents when the child does not pronounce phonemes well and audiogenic dyslalia causes you to not articulate words well due to a hearing loss
At the age of 5 you can still recreate the lisp where the sound / s / is pronounced as / z /. Another incorrect way to pronounce is when they can't represent the letter / r /: "dog" for "hit".
They omit the final consonants and it is usually observed in words like / truck / for / truck / and they substitute infinity of consonants for others. Examples are: / ll /, / ñ /, / ch /, / j /, / g /, / k / by other phonemes that are articulated at the back as / t /, / d /, / n /, / l /, / s /. Examples: "doll" for "doll", "scream" for "sillar".
How is the speech problem diagnosed and how to help?
Faced with the evidence of all these continuous errors in their speech, parents must take your child to the family doctor, where you will find out how to request a speech therapist.
The speech therapist will do an evaluation to assess whether the child recognize receptive language. Another exam will be to check if he expresses well what he is thinking. Between this process you will observe if you pronounce the sounds correctly with total clarity. Other points to work on will be if there is a problem in all parts of the oral-motor apparatus, in case they don't work well together.
If a problem has been found, the speech therapist will work with the child in order to improve your language skills, where part of your tasks will be to work at home with the guidelines indicated. At home, pronunciation and language development can also be promoted through stories, reading, word games or singing songs.
In order to learn much more about pronunciation problems in children, you can read us at this link: When is it normal for a child to learn to speak?, or being able to know much more about learning disabilities, when the dyslalia and dyslexia in children.