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DISCOVER TalkTools: Address your child's Speech and Feeding challenges through Oral Placement Therapy (OPT).
Welcome to TalkTools - a leading approach designed to empower your child to communicate effectively and with confidence. If your child is facing speech and motor coordination difficulties, you're in the right place. Learn more about TalkTools and how it can make a difference in your child's life.
Oral Motor Deficits in Children
Oral motor deficits refer to impairments in the capacity to control mouth muscles, which subsequently affect essential functions such as speech and feeding. If your child is having trouble controlling his mouth muscles to talk and eat, and doesn’t seem able to master chewing, blowing, or making specific sounds, he may have an oral motor disorder. The disorders can be categorised into three principal types:
Oral or Verbal Apraxia: This refers to motor planning difficulties - the inability to get the mouth to do what the brain tells it to do due to these difficulties.
Dysarthria:Characterised by muscle weakness or sluggishness which impacts feeding and speech.
Developmental Delay in Musculature:A lag in the development of muscles required for eating.
Why does a child experience oral motor deficits?
Oral motor disorders may arise from incorrect motor programming of the oral muscles. The brain may send a message to the oral muscles, but the muscles may either not receive or Read More
misinterpret the instruction, resulting in incorrect or absent movements. Additionally, deficits in muscle memory can impair the automatization of these movements.
Low muscle tone in areas such as the lips, tongue, or jaw may also contribute. For example, children with low muscle tone in the jaw frequently have their mouths open, and those with weak lip muscles may struggle to drink from a straw, often losing control of liquids in the process of drinking.
Weak oral muscles may compromise a child's gag reflex or induce choking, thus leading to feeding disorders. Hence, strengthening the muscles and resetting the neural pathways is important in treating oral motor and feeding disorders.
Assessment
The therapy begins with a comprehensive assessment by a qualified speech-language therapist. This assessment involves evaluating the client's oral motor function and speech abilities.
- Checking for signs of weakness or low muscle tone in the lips, jaw, and tongue.
- Seeing how well the child can coordinate mouth movements by having him imitate non-speech actions such as opening the mouth, moving the tongue from side to side, smiling, frowning, puckering the lips.
- Evaluating the coordination and sequencing of muscle movements for speech while the child performs tasks such as the diadochokinetic rate, in which the child repeats strings of sounds such as puh-tuh-kuh.
- Assessing the child’s skills in social significant behaviours (‘real-life’ situations), such as blowing a candle, licking a lollipop etc.
Intervention
Based on the assessment findings, the speech therapist sets clear and individualized goals for the child. These goals are specific to the child's needs and may include improving articulation, speech clarity, or feeding. Oral Placement Therapy (OPT) involves a series of structured oral motor exercises and activities designed to target the identified weaknesses.
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