Understanding Normal Speech and Language Development

It can be difficult to tell whether a child is just immature in his or her ability to communicate or has a problem that requires professional attention.

These developmental norms may provide clues:

Before 12 Months

It's important for kids this age to be watched for signs that they're using their voices to relate to their environment. Cooing and babbling are early stages of speech development. As babies get older (often around 9 months), they begin to string sounds together, incorporate the different tones of speech, and say words like "mama" and "dada" (without really understanding what those words mean).

Before 12 months, children should also be attentive to sound and begin to recognize names of common objects (for example bottle, binky, etc.). Babies who watch intently but don't react to sound may be showing signs of hearing loss.

By 12 to 15 Months

Kids this age should have a wide range of speech sounds in their babbling (like p, b, m, d, or n), begin to imitate and approximate sounds and words modeled by family members, and typically say one or more words (not including "mama" and "dada") spontaneously. Nouns usually come first, like "baby" and "ball." Your child should also be able to understand and follow simple one-step directions ("Please give me the toy," for example).

A

Modern medical and pedagogical methods make it possible to determine if a child is unable to study at an ordinary school. Forms of mental diseases resulting in deficiency are varied. Some cases are so obvious, that a psychoneurologist who kept the child under observation from infancy can easily recommend parents to place him in an auxiliary school to avoid unnecessary traumas. Sometimes when a child in unable to cope with the syllabus and has to stay in the l^st or 2^ndform for several years he may come to hate the school and his studies. To bring errors down to a minimum each child, before being removed to an auxiliary school, carefully examined by a commission consisting of the headmaster, an inspector from a district or city public education department, a number of psychiatrists, and his teacher.

If, during his stay at an auxiliary school, his teacher there finds that he could return to an ordinary school, the headmaster must inform the local public education authorities at once, no matter what time of the year the decision is made.

A

Disabled people suffer a lot, they feel exempted from our society by the treatment they receive from others.Long time, disabled children were neglected by their families. Education wasn't allowed for people with disabilities they were hardly prompt. Most of the people in Lebanon will stay away from disabled humans. But aren’t they the same as normal one’s? Don’t they have a good hearth? They want the same things that normal people do, they eat the same food. Everything is the same, but they have a part of their body that’s malfunctioning. The technology and the science are developed as much that it has made disabled people lives easier. In Lebanon, there are rules for disabled people, but unfortunately these rules aren’t always followed. For example not in every public toilet has a special place for them, not every parking has place left for wheel chairs. But they feel more pain in their hearth when they are pushed away from society. This will hurt them even more than any rules. Even if they can’t walk it doesn’t mean that they can’t be any help. They want to work like a normal employee; they want to be treated like a person, not like they don’t exist or, just because God wanted them to be like this, don’t have a life. Here we have some private sector for disabled people but it’s not enough. There has to be more activities for them, more learning schools. They have to be encouraged to participate to any events, because in this way they will be recovered faster and in some way they will be normal.

B

In the process of education the teacher's understanding of the children's feelings towards each other and the understanding of his feelings towards the children is of fundamental importance. The better the teacher is able to understand these feelings, the more likely he is succeed in this very difficult task. To this extent there is very little difference between special education and education in general. However, children selected for special education have distinctive characteristics. The majority of these children has been tried in ordinary school and has failed. This sense of failure naturally influences the children's feelings. Moreover, their specific handicap often makes learning very difficult for them. In this respect the teacher of handicapped children needs even greater skills than the teacher in ordinary schools. He constantly needs to consider the educational process in relation to the child's handicap fit. In this way special education adds to the developmental process of educational a therapeutic element and the teacher is therefore constantly working on the boundary between therapy and education.

A

M D Ryan - United Kingdom
Disabled people are often disadvantaged economically, so accessing services is only part of the answer. For laws on eliminating “disability” discrimination, resources have to be available to fund improvements and be implemented with a degree of commonsense. What’s the point spending so much money improving the infrastructure carte blanche; ramps to all banks, shops, etc., etc., and then deny a decent pension to enable people to live independently? Too much choice doesn’t always improve living standards. Less bureaucracy and tax incentives aimed at encouraging people to fend for themselves and families is perhaps more appropriate. It's important to remember people are disabled by the environment around them - not necessarily whatever their condition or impairment is. Better understanding from others around them, building design and other access means people aren't 'disabled' - they are enabled to use services like everyone else already can. A man got to the moon in 1969 - it will be 2020 before disabled people in Britain have legal access to all transport systems... why is this? Disabled people should be able to use shops, banks and schools. Disabled people should be able to do what they want when they want

B

Is it possible to repair cleft lips and cleft palates? The only way cleft lips can be repaired is trough plastic surgery. But repairing the lip is not an emergency operation. Babies can learn to eat quite satisfactorily with the cleft lip. In fact will usually be better for the baby's health if he is permitted to gain weight and get a good start before he undergoes an operation. Sometimes it is not possible for the surgeon to achieve the desired result with the first operation and he will recommend a second operation on the child's lip at a later time. The purpose of first operation is to bring together the separated parts of the lip in as good a relationship as possible. The objective of the secondary operation is to improve the appearance of the lip by correcting any unevenness which might remain after the first operation.

Parents are usually anxious to have the child's palate repaired as soon as possible. Actually it is better to give the child a chance to grow before closing the palate. In some cases the specialists may decide they can close the palate when the child is only a few months old. In other cases, they may decide to wait for a few years. Sometimes the specialists feel it would be difficult to obtain a satisfactory closure by surgery at any time. For this children? It is possible to remedy the cleft palate through dental procedures.

A

How does a normal child learn the language of his culture? First the child learns to understand language because the people in his environment talk about objects, events. The language learning process begins at birth. The infant begins to associate sounds with objects, events. From the age of 6 months he develops understanding of the meaning of words and word combinations as they are used by others in his environment. Hearing is the sensory avenue for this learning process. At the age of eleven to fifteen months the normal child may begin to express what he sees, feels or wants by the use of a single word. Later he will combine two words in expression and still later he will progress from simple sentences to a wider variety of sentence forms. At the age of six the normal child can communicate verbally with anyone in his culture. Because hearing impairment is not usually detected at birth, the child with serious auditory impairment cannot begin acquiring language until the impairment is discovered and special education is initiated.

B