Speech Therapy for Dyslexia: Helping Your Child Succeed

Dyslexia can sometimes impact a child's language production and speech development. For instance, some dyslexic children may experience verbal dyspraxia, a condition that affects the muscle movements involved in speaking. This can lead to delayed speech, pitch variations, and syntax issues. Furthermore, in some cases, apraxia or infantile speech apraxia may contribute to slurred speech and an elevated risk of speech disorders. When seeking support for dyslexic children, it's essential to consider effective verbal dyspraxia treatment options to address their specific speech-related challenges.

Specialists focus on decoding and speech sounds for dyslexic children as dyslexia often affects their ability to understand individual sounds in language. Speech therapy for dyslexia helps children connect each part and sound of a word by associating letters to sounds, breaking words into sounds, and merging sounds into words, resulting in the improved pronunciation of unfamiliar words. Decoding also helps children become more familiar with words and improve their reading comprehension. Language games used in speech and language therapy for dyslexia help children expand their vocabulary and develop phonological recognition skills to enhance their reading abilities.

It is possible children with dyslexia have delayed speech development compared to kids of the same age. In fact, some children with dyslexia might not begin speaking until they are three or four. You should speak to your doctor if your child is not speaking within their second year.

Speech therapy can help your child improve their communication and social skills and process sensory information more effectively. Speech therapy activities for dyslexia target:

• Improving fine motor skills and coordination
• Language development and vocabulary usage
• Understanding social cues and responses
• Improving communication
• Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) therapy

Dyslexia does not necessarily worsen with age. However, it can be easier to provide strategies to overcome symptoms with remediation. Symptoms of dyslexia aren’t something a child can grow out of, but they can receive proper guidance and support to help improve their reading, language, speech, and learning skills.

Yes, dyslexia is a condition your child was born with. It is often genetic and, in many cases, indicates your child could have above-average intelligence. Many parents worry their child is below average due to their struggles with reading problems. However, this is not necessarily the case.

Typically, dyslexia diagnosis is conducted by a team of specialists. Speech Therapists are involved in the dyslexia diagnosis process, evaluating listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. A qualified psychologist provides the final diagnosis after completing a psycho-educational evaluation in hand with their review of the team’s findings.

Since dyslexia presents a phonological challenge, Speech Therapists are one of the best supports for reading. We teach your child to avoid phonological errors and understand how sounds work together to pronounce words. Speech Therapists also use multisensory techniques to provide tailor-made reading programs for your child’s specific literacy challenges.

Early intervention provides effective instruction to help children acquire proper skills to learn the relationship between letters, their sounds, and how they contribute to creating words. Therapists can “train” your child’s brain to improve how they see and process the information while reading, to develop improved pronunciation and skills that help them “sound out” words more effectively. If therapy isn’t provided, your child can develop emotional issues, including:

• Becoming withdrawn from social circles
• Depression
• Anxiety (especially when faced with presentations or public speaking)
• Declining behavior
• Increased incidences of “acting out”
• Low self-esteem
• Relationship problems
• Lack of motivation or interest in school and other activities

Throughout their education, they will also struggle with the following:

• Learning new words
• Speech development
• Writing letters and numbers properly
• Reading at the expected age level
• Spelling and grammar problems
• Poor sentence structure
• School presentations and public speaking
• Copying correct text from secondary sources

The sooner you seek speech therapy assessment for dyslexia, the sooner your child will learn the strategies needed to succeed.