speech delays

My daughter also has speech delays identified by her ped at her 1 yr well baby visit. She was babbling but it was all giberish and with few real words. I have been told that many refluxers also have speech delays, but from what I’ve read, this is more true when there are accompanying feeding problems. We were also told that when they don’t eat well, they don’t develop the proper musculature and tongue movements needed for clear speech.

As I had, Hailey was babbling a lot, but nothing was clear. We just had a hearing test and a follow-up with an ENT over the past two weeks, and both found that her tympanogram is flat, and that she has a hearing loss somewhere from mild-moderate.

There is wide variability of normal in these things- my mother didn’t say a word until she was two years old, and my niece and nephew didn’t either, though they babbled a fair bit before that from what I remember. But if your daughter is just now starting to make sounds, and especially since you’re worried, I always think it’s best to get things checked out earlier rather than later.

Good luck.

First of all, get the evaluation done! Don’t know where you are located but she is 2 and therefore you can get the evaluation done through early intervention. Check out the rules of how EI works because you may want her to get a full eval rather than a speech eval only (ask me if you have questions about this).

We just got back from a speech eval ourselves. Does she have any words at all? What type of sounds is she making? Does she put syllables together (sorry i just came from a 2 hour eval so i have some of this fresh in my mind!).

For Matthew – and i really know what i just learned today – his receptive language is really advanced (he is at 21months or above, the guy stopped at one point LOL) and that is in 2 languages. His expressive language is really behind – he is at the 10month level because he says no words and he only says a few sounds. The sounds he makes are sounds that you can make without moving the tongue and with the back of your throat… so then we did the feeding part and obviously he is delayed. he is unable to lateralize the tongue and even move it back and forth. That makes it very difficult to eat and to talk… so for him, because of his reflux diagnosis, the speech evaluator thinks that the lack of eating skills is leading to a lack of talking skills…. does that make sense?? So to what Lori was saying – yes, reflux can lead to delays in speech.

Hope this helps. If her receptive language is good, i would get the speech pathologist to do the evaluation and see what she finds!