Speech, language, hearing delays: Time for early intervention?
A wait-and-see approach may not be best for the child exhibiting delayed development. This review—complete with extensive resource lists—can facilitate an expeditious referral.
Is therapy effective? Speech and language pathologists use the National Outcomes Measurement System (NOMS) as an index of the outcomes of treatment on functional communication along 6 scales. The most frequent types of communication problems seen in the prekindergarten children’s NOMS were “articulation” (75% of children), “spoken language production” (61%), and “spoken language comprehension” (42%). Problems in the remaining 3 scales (“pragmatics,” “cognitive orientation,” and “swallowing”) were seen in fewer than 15% of the preschool-age students.28
Articulation therapy yielded improvement in 69.3% of cases, spoken language comprehension therapy in 65.3%, and spoken language production therapy in 65.2%.28 Such outcomes support regular screening of children’s communication development and, as needed, referral for EI.
TABLE 3
CORRESPONDENCE
Christopher Mulrine, EdD; William Paterson University, 1600 Valley Road 3003 Wayne, NJ 07474-0920; mulrinec@wpunj.edu
