attention as soon as possible and can be fit with hearing aids as young as three months or have a cochlear implant as early as six months. Language disorders. Limit a child’s ability to understand and/or use words and sentences to express themselves; a child’s ability to learn reading and writing may also be affected. Articulation problems. May be present if children continue to pronounce speech sounds incorrectly at an age when their speech should be more understandable. Remember, children learn the sounds of speech gradually and aren’t expected to pronounce them all correctly when they start talking or even by the time they enter Kindergarten. Stuttering. Affects a person’s ability to speak smoothly and easily. Most children ‘stutter’ sometimes—when in a hurry or excited, learning to use new words, or make longer, more complicated sentences. This becomes a problem
when it persists and happens frequently. Voice disorders. May limit a child’s ability to produce voice or cause a child to have a hoarse or ‘scratchy’ voice. If you think your child has difficulty with any of these, contact a speech-language pathologist or audiologist for an evaluation. If you’re concerned about your preschool child, call the Northwest Arkansas Education Service Cooperative. For school-age children, talk to your child’s teacher or the speech-language pathologist at school. Other resources include the University of Arkansas Speech & Hearing Clinic and audiologists and speech-language pathologists in private practice. Early intervention is the key to helping young children with speech, language, or hearing problems. The 2008 theme for Better Hearing and Speech Month is ‘Helping People Communicate.’ If you think your child needs help communicating, call to schedule an evaluation.