Patient's question:
Did you go to the hospital for a check-up and it was normal? What should you do?Doctor's answer:
Hello, parents need to undergo relevant training. Some mentally retarded children are still unable to speak at the age of 5-6. How is their intelligence? Please refer to the following text: Language is the shell of thinking and also a tool for communication. Normal children are born with a physiological basis or potential for understanding and speaking, and with proper guidance at a certain age, they can learn to understand and speak. However, mentally retarded children, due to brain damage or functional defects, may have language barriers. The more severe the mental retardation, the more severe the language barrier. Moreover, language barriers are the hardest to correct. Language mainly has three aspects: (1) phonetics; (2) understanding, i.e., comprehension; (3) speaking, i.e., expression. Sometimes, pronunciation is also placed in the category of expression. When training mentally retarded children to speak, the first step is to observe the characteristics of their language. Characteristics of Language Development in Mentally Retarded Children The degree of language impairment in mentally retarded children can range from limited vocabulary and simple sentence structures to complete inability to speak or understand. The language impairment characteristics mentioned below are those of mild to moderate mentally retarded children and do not include those of severe or profound mentally retarded children: (1) The language development pattern of mentally retarded children differs from that of normal children. Normal children often first babble (producing unintelligible sounds), then learn to understand, and finally learn to speak, with the basic process completed by the age of 3-4. Mentally retarded children, however, often lack speech (crying is still present), and as they grow older, under the "reinforcement education" (i.e., constant speaking to them) of parents, they may learn to understand some daily expressions but not speak (mildly delayed children may speak some words). Some mentally retarded children may still not speak by the age of 5-6. (2) Late onset of speech, requiring more teaching time from adults. Generally, through reinforcement education, mildly or moderately delayed children can learn to speak, but the earliest they may start speaking is at 4-5 or 5-6 years old, and they may only say one or two words. (3) Unclear pronunciation, understandable only to the closest family members. This may be related to their poor ability to distinguish human language, as well as their loss of the optimal age for learning phonetics (1.5-3 years old). Of course, it may also be related to defects in their language organs or weak brain control. (4) Greatly superior ability to understand language (comprehension) compared to the ability to express language (speaking). They can often follow adult instructions to do things (e.g., bring a soap box), but cannot use language to express their needs (e.g., ask their mother to read the storybook about the little white rabbit eating radishes), only using gestures or pointing. (5) Incomplete speech, often only mentioning the words they consider important, such as "drink" (to express drinking) or "hit" (to express being hit by a child). Adults can only understand their meaning from their eyes, gestures, or expressions. (6) Saying two consecutive words is a difficult challenge in language learning. For example, teaching a 5-year-old mentally retarded child to say "pen," they may only say "pen," and when teaching them to say "apple," they may only say "fruit." If this "step" is passed, learning three-word phrases like "red flower," "Tiananmen" becomes much easier. (7) Mildly mentally retarded children have relatively good language skills, can form complete sentences, and answer simple questions, but their sentence structures are simple and their content monotonous, which is related to their simple thinking. (8) Repetitive language phenomena, such as a 6-year-old mildly mentally retarded child often saying, "What are you doing?" or "Why isn't he coming?" and repeating these phrases dozens of times a day. Starting from comprehension, training mentally retarded children to speak must begin with comprehension. For mentally retarded children, comprehension is easier than expression. Parents often say, "He understands, he just can't speak." Therefore, the training task is relatively easier. However, since the intellectual levels of mentally retarded children vary, their levels of comprehension also differ. Severely mentally retarded children may only understand a few commands, moderately mentally retarded children can understand dozens of commands, while mildly mentally retarded children understand more. However, the language they understand is mostly limited to repeated daily activities. To train mentally retarded children in comprehension, the following methods can be used: (1) Create a language environment. In daily life, no matter what you are doing, try to explain it to the child and describe the actions you are taking. For example, "I'm cutting an apple for you," "I'm knitting a sweater for Dad," "You're playing with a toy train." Through continuous repetition, help the child associate objects, actions, and the words that represent them. (2) Take the child out to shop, the park, or the zoo to expand their exposure to new things. Try to let them listen and see as much as possible. Focus on repeating certain things each time to help them remember. (3) Train the child to point to objects by sound. Start by showing the child objects: "This is a table," "This is a shoe." Then ask the child: "Which is the table?" "Where is your shoe?" etc. Small daily tasks can be used for this, and questions can be asked at any time. Initially, you can start with objects around the child, then gradually move on to using pictures to teach and ask questions. Choose pictures with clear outlines, bright colors, and appropriate sizes for easy handling. Start by teaching nouns like "hand," "eye," "orange," "bowl," and later move on to verbs like "He is running," "Sister is jumping." For verb learning, you can also say it while guiding the child to perform the action. Generally, children enjoy action games. (4) Guessing games. When the child's vocabulary reaches around 30 words, you can start playing guessing games with them. Place pictures of apples, bananas, and bicycles on the table and say to the child, "Which one is the banana? Please tell me." If they point correctly, praise them immediately. If they point incorrectly, don't criticize, but review the word for a while longer. Once they master this method, you can put these pictures in a cloth bag and say to the child, "Please take out the picture of the bicycle for me." Since all three pictures are initially invisible, the difficulty increases, but so does the interest. This is very beneficial for training their accuracy in comprehension. The most important point in training mentally retarded children to understand language is to repeat it many times. Experience tells us that teaching them to understand a noun may require hundreds or even thousands of repetitions. Sometimes it's not that they can't learn, but that they haven't been repeated enough. Normal children's development of language comprehension (understanding) goes through five stages: First stage: Shortly after birth, they can react to sound stimuli. For example, newborns can "listen" to sounds and roughly distinguish where the sounds are coming from. Second stage: 2-3 weeks after birth. They can distinguish the frequency variations between different sounds and differentiate between human voices and other sounds. Third stage: 2-3 months later, they can respond to the emotions expressed in adult speech. For example, they may shrink or cry when they hear scolding, or laugh when they hear playful sounds. At this stage, they can also distinguish between the voices of close people and strangers. Fourth stage: 3-4 months later, they can understand some simple sentences spoken to them. They have already become aware of the tone and rhythm of speech. Fifth stage: Just before they turn 1 year old, their ability to understand adult speech significantly improves, and they can understand many simple sentences, but they still cannot speak.