Speech Evaluation

As many of you know, we have been concerned about Ben's speech patterns for several months. While he certainly understands everything, follows directions and does communicate verbally, he tends to mix up several consonants, drop consonants at the beggining of many words and is plain difficult to understand for most people who do not speak "Benjamin" (aka everyone other than Andrew and me!). So, I talked to the doctor and although they did not seem very concerned, they gave me the number for the Early Intervention Learning Center to set up an evaluation.

We had three developmental specialists come to the house this morning to assess Ben's speech through observation and a play-based exam. In order to qualify for intervention speech services, Ben would have to be 25% behind for his age, or at or below a 21-month-old level, since he is 28 months old.

The result of the test is that Ben has a minor delay with a few consonants but other than that, he has no speech problems and is within normal range for a child of his age. He does not need extra speech therapy and with a little practice, should have these few consonants worked out in a few months. The language specialists actually said that he is very advanced for his age in terms of vocabulary, imaginative play, fine motor skills, counting/ABCs/color recognition and deductive reasoning. So that was encouraging!

As a result of today's evaluation, we have a handful of activities to help Ben articulate his words more clearly so that he will hopefully soon be understood by more people!