Alalia is a violation of speech (or its complete absence) in children. At the same time, there are no functional disorders of the hearing aid. Speech disorder is caused by poor development or disruption of the brain regions responsible for speech, the cause of which is the destruction of these areas during the intrauterine development period or in the first years of the child's life.
Motor alalia in children is called the delay in the development of expressive speech, caused by the underdevelopment or disturbance of the speech-motor analyzer (as a rule, damage to the conducting ways of the speech motor and its cortical end). Outwardly, the violation of the analytic-sitentic activity of this site is expressed in replacing complex and subtle grammatical-articulatory structures with simpler and coarser ones.
Motor alalia in children has the following symptoms: the child has difficulty in making suggestions, mastering the grammar of the language, has a small active vocabulary, but also understands the speech of other people.
Treatment and prognosis
The examination of children with alalia is carried out in a complex, with the interaction of the neurologist, pediatrician and speech therapist. In this case, it is most important to determine the degree of brain damage, because depending on this, the severity of the disease is distinguished. In mild cases of alalia in children, treatment is limited to sessions with a speech therapist and at home, which quickly allows you to teach your child new words and grammar. In the case of severe damage to speech centers, treatment can be ineffective, allowing only a little development of the child's active vocabulary, and speech as a whole remains at an elementary level: scant and grammatically incorrect.
To achieve maximum effectiveness, in the treatment of alalia in children, complex therapy is used, which includes three components:
- Speech therapy sessions (both with a specialist and with a homework). A specially developed system of speech therapy correction of various kinds of alalia helps to expand the vocabulary and make the speech of the child more correct. This type of treatment is effective only in the case of systematic studies.
- Logopedic massage. It is based on the impact on the speech muscles in order to normalize the tone of the articulatory muscles and facilitate the pronunciation of sounds. Such massage is carried out by special probes. Typically, one course of treatment consists of 8-10 sessions.
- Microcurrent reflexotherapy. The purpose of such treatment is to activate cortex sites that are responsible for the desire to speak, vocabulary and diction, the skill of constructing sentences, etc. The course consists of 15 sessions. The number of courses and treatment regimens are highly individual, depending on the degree of delay in the development of an individual child.
- Drug treatment. Despite the fact that convincing scientific evidence of the positive effect of medicines and the more BADs do not, doctors often prescribe nootropics and vitamins. The most popular medicines are preparations of a number: spitum, cortexin, gamma-lon, ceraxon, complexes of vitamins of group B, etc.
Of great importance in the treatment of alalia are domestic occupations with the child (in particular, with the use of visual materials).
Characteristics of the personality of a child with alalia
Characteristics of children with motor alalia:
- reduced performance, fast fatigue;
- difficulty concentrating, keeping attention;
- secondary retardation of intellectual development, which, as a rule, passes with the development of speech;
- in connection with the damage to the brain regions, various impairments of perception are often observed: visual, auditory, tactile, etc., that is, a child can, for example, not distinguish similar sounds or colors, confuse forms, etc .;
- despite some lag in development, children-alaliki are not closed, they are eager to play, learn, learn new things,
communicate, replacing speech with expressive facial expressions, various gestures, etc .; - mental infantilism: frequent change of mood (not always appropriate to the situation), excessive foolishness, gullibility and naivety, inability to self-criticism.
It is possible to learn the peculiarities of the psyche of children with alalia, observing their behavior, in particular, in the game (independent or with other children). The higher the severity of brain damage, the more irritability, aggression, isolation, unwillingness to contact or continue to act in the event of difficulties.