To intervene, or not. Or when to intervene. Intervening promptly, when necessary.

With a child with a developmental impairment of speech and / or language, there is an obvious question: Will the child just grow out of it?

If, as commonly assumed by those study human speech and language, it represents a highly evolved skill, it is only to be expected that some children will have problems mastering one or more parts of the skill.

But the natural pathway of development sometimes fails to proceed correctly or stops prematurely. If an adult can’t say any long words correctly, this gets noticed. Sometimes it’s obvious. Even if no one is rude enough to point the issue out, speakers are often aware of the problem themselves. Such individuals may regret that their issue was not addressed during their childhood. In adulthood it is much harder to address any issues with speech.

The normally developing child is ready to start learning to relate to other children at around the age of three. But if the child has a significant issue with speech or language, the normal process of learning to relate to age peers may not get off the ground. In the most severe sort of case there may be  no speech or language at all, or there may be just one word, or what there is is impossible to understand. Such issues need to be treated promptly.

Even if the issue is just a delay in the normal process, as a delay increases, the case for intervention obviously gets stronger.

Common issues with speech

In the speech of children of three and three and a half, yellow as LELO or little as LIKU do not generally, and should not, cause any anxiety about speech development, It is developmentally normal. But if a seven year old is still saying yellow as LELO or little as LIKU, he or she probably does need help – and typically recognises this.

But there are both more and less profound degrees of need.

Many children have problems with:

• ‘Fronting’ saying key as TEA, car as TAR, with the airstream stopped by the tip of the tongue for T, rather than the back of the tongue for K;
• ‘Stopping’ saying see saw as TEA TAW with the airstream completely stopped for a brief moment;
• ‘Voicing’, saying P at the beginnings of words, saying pear as BEAR, and B at the ends of words, saying bib as BIP.

Such issue are commonly termed ‘processes‘, as an aspect of ‘speech ‘speech sound disorders’. Various other terms are used – ‘articulation disorders’, ‘phonetic issues’, and more.

But some children have more serious, more complex issues, making them hard or impossible to understand, other than to those who know them well, and sometimes not even then. Such issues are sometimes referred to as ‘Childhood Apraxia of Speech’ or Verbal Dyspraxia‘ or ‘phonological disorders‘. A child of three in this situation needs help promptly.

Common issues with language

One common issue with language is not realising that in English, in what are known as ‘declaratives’ or statements, there has to be a ‘subject’ – either a ‘noun’ like Mummy or Daddy, as in “Mummy is working”, or a ‘pronoun’ like he or she as in “He is sleeping”, or an element doing duty as a subject like there, as in “There are toys on the floor”. A child with this sort of issue, shown a picture of a man eating at a table, does not recognise the difference between “Tell me about this picture” and “What is the man doing”. Such a child is likely to reply “Eating” or “Eating dinner” in both cases. Not realising that sentences have subjects makes the understanding of language a hit and miss affair.

Children normally start to understand about subjects in sentences at around two and a quarter. This is part of syntax. A child much older than two may have a correspondingly much richer understanding of the world than a two year old. But the language issue will still get in the way of making friends and other relationships

A target language and no privileged information

The child does not know that the language he or she is targeting has a particular set of characteristics. English happens to have very little in the way of what is known as morphology, or the building of words, from roots like sleep, fall, drink, love, words which are commonly used as either nouns as in He’s had a sleep” or “He had a fall yesterday’”, or verbs as in “He has slept” or “He fell yesterday”. English also has an uncommonly complex (and rigid) set of auxiliaries.

Issues with ‘syntax‘ and morphology, or language. are easy to miss. It was once thought the acquisition of language was mostly complete by around the age of five. It was Carol Chomsky, Noam Chomsky’s wife, who in 1969 demonstrated convincingly that this is not the case. Some quite subtle aspects of English are, for most children, only gradually emerging up to the age of ten or even later. Carol Chomsky studied various phenomena. Take the verbs, ask, tell, and promise. And consider an imaginary situation with a mouse, a friend and two things to choose between to feed the mouse, a cheese sandwich and a DVD in its box. (I am updating the situation here.) In “Ask your friend what to give the mouse to eat” the experimental issue is whether and at what age the child realises the instruction is about him or her doing the feeding. Carol Chomsky found that even as children approached the age of ten, some still thought the instruction was about the friend doing the feeding. She sets out the quite complex sequence by which children learn this and other quite intricate aspects of English grammar, mostly between the ages of five and ten.

Karen Stromswold (2006) shows that children’s understanding of passive sentences, as in “The cat was bitten by the dog” or “The cat got bitten by the dog” in contrast to the active form in “The dog bit the cat” is by a complex process between the ages of two and seven.

Learning the full syntax of English passives is a difficult, prolonged process. As Julie Anne Legate (2014) shows the English passive represents a most complex combination of word order, the use of by, and changes in the form of the verb. Another aspect of the difficulty here may be due to the fact that both discourse and syntax are involved. In “The cat was bitten”. the cat loses a degree of agency, and the focus shifts to whoever or whatever was doing the biting. This focus shifting is expressed by the syntax. But the two things are separate. Competent English involves playing the discourse and the syntax together.

By the proposal here, the most fundamental principles of what is known as ‘Universal Grammar‘ are normally established by the age of three. But as Carol Chomsky shows the full complexity of the system, with all of the principles interacting with one another, may be not completely mastered until ten or later, or, for some people, never.

The grammar gets harder if there are any significant, interacting factors. In the Reynell Developmental Language Scales, one well-known test of what is supposed to be ‘receptive language‘, in a scenario where the question is appropriate, the child is asked “Which red pencil has not been put away?” But if the child fails to respond appropriately, it is unclear if the child is confused by the passive, the negation or the complexity of the phrase, red pencil, or any two of these things, or just one.

As Carol Chomsky stresses, in any test or assessment, it is very important to make sure that the child is ready for any task which may be given and understands every element of it. Not an easy thing to do.

An evolved skill is vulnerable

Speech and language represent the most highly evolved skill of which humans are capable, far more complex than the most difficult games or the most challenging musical score. Learning to talk, or speech and language aquisition, is a difficult, prolonged, and many-sided process. There are many possible scenarios. By the proposal here, there was a sequence of evolutionary steps over tens or hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, and this is reflected in the acquisition process in humans today. The evidence is partly from the data of children’s speech and language. By this proposal, neither in human evolutionary history nor in the development of a modern child is any other sequence logically possible. But it is very possible for the child to reach a given point, misconstrue the evidence about how to implement it, and then make no further progress for an extended period. For instance, the child learning English might get the idea of a single word, but then mistakenly conclude that English has tones (like Chinese and about half the languages in the world). In such a scenario, that single word will most likely be said with exactly the same sequence of tones whenever it is used. But there will be no further development because the input will seem chaotic with every other word said with whatever combination of tones happens to be perceived, but with no logical or consistent pattern. Or the child may be daunted by the complexity of the acquisition path, and decide (perhaps unconsciously) to hold back until things are clearer. Stromswold (2022) describes what may be such a case.

There are two two sorts of ways in which we can be confident that speech and language are evolved skills:

First we can contrast the linguistic competence which the overwhelming majority of humans master with no specific guidance in around ten years with the efforts of non humans intensively coached in what seems to be the most congenial form of language, namely sign language.

Second there are various sorts of competence in langkuage which have plainly not been taught which people plainly know. One of these is the case of what were named ‘ islands’,in 1967 parts of structures which are marooned and not available to be questioned. Another is the odd case in English and a number of other languages by which that and equivalent words in other language which can generally be said or not, are at least highly disfavoured, if not ungrammatical. All of these are often known as poverty of stimulus phenomena. There is no stimulus for the child to learn them.

We know without being taught that the question in “Was the man who was at the gate doing anything silly?” is about doing something silly, not being at the gate.

If the question is asked “Is the child under the table doing something silly?” The answer might be “Yes, she is.” But she is cannot be contracted to “Yes, she’s”.

In “The king got to the venue before he put on his tie”, it may or may not be that it was the king who was without a tie. But in “Before he put on his tie the king got to the venue”, he can’t be the king.

Where a possible answer might be “Chips”, “What do you like fish and?” is barely interpretable. Fish and chips is an island.

To most English speakers, the question “What do you think that blew down the tree?” does not sound as good as “What do you think blew down the tree?” But “What do you think that the wind blew down?” sounds fine.

These and other such poverty of stimulus phenomena seem to many linguists clear evidence that children must approach the task of learning to talk with some, perhaps vaguely stated, idea of how the target language may work, and conversely of how it can’t work. Such an idea can only have evolved.

But if an evolved skill fails, it is treatable, either by intensifying the sort of experience which makes learning possible, or in some other way.

Worries and natural variation

There is a natural variation in what children learn when. Some are early talkers. Some not. But at a given point a child’s failure to follow anything like the ‘normal schedule‘ becomes a matter of justifiable concern.

People are entitled to decide, I believe, whether they want to be helped or not. Does it matter if a child can’t say one or two long and unusual words? Or can’t say passives? Or says “I promised her to give me a present” – meaning “I persuaded her to promise to give me a present” – or something like that? When is a child ready to decide this for himself or herself? To me, this depends on age, how obvious the issue is, the degree of immaturity or distance from the normal developmental pathway, and in the case of children, the way the family takes decisions.

One factor, perhaps the largest factor, in deciding whether to intervene is whether or not the child appears to be on a natural pathway. Some children just proceed along the natural pathway slower than others, sometimes much slower.

Issues of anatomy and the distribution of nerves

Of course there are phenomena which fall outside the schema of what is known as ‘learnability‘. Because the Faculty of Language is ultimately biological it is subject to all the possible vicissitudes of biology. Critical sensitivities can fail to develop. One muscle can be wrongly paired with another muscle so that both operate together when competent speech requires them to work separately. Or an area of extreme sensisitivity like the fleshy area behind the upper front teeth can be inadequately innervated. And so on.

As a speech and language therapy student, I was taught to feel inside the mouth around the hard palate with my fingers, and decide whether it was normal or not. There are obvious variations in the shape of the hard palate, just as there are variations in the shape of the face. But the significance for speech of the variations is not well known. And poking around with the fingers inside the mouth is not going to reveal any untoward defects in the innervation or abnormalities in the independences of the various muscles.

There are theories by which the strength of the speech musculature and ‘jaw stability’ are critical variables. But efforts to test them have not shown them to be useful.

Physical issues are real. There are malformations. And there are various disorders of hearing. But it is a grave mistake in my view to assume that any disorder is likely to be caused by such factors.

Where such issues do occur, there are no magic wands. Therapy just has to look for the best possible solution.

This website

For parents with the worries that I once had.