First thing to do if your child is a late talker or has unclear speech

There are several things you can do to support your child if they are a late talker or have unclear speech. However one thing I’d always recommend doing straight away is getting their hearing checked and I’ll explain why…

To develop spoken language, children must be able to hear speech clearly and also to hear themselves; therefore if a child has an episode of hearing loss it can impact their speech and language skills. If a child doesn’t realise we are talking to them (because they can't hear us) they aren't going to be able to attach language to meaning. For example, if you are in the garden and there is a bird and you point and say “look a bird” but they don't hear you they won't attach the word 'bird' to the animal. In this way it can affect both children’s understanding of language as well as their ability to use words.

Hearing loss can also affect children’s speech sounds. A child with a mild hearing loss may not be able to hear high frequency sounds like ‘s’, ‘f’ and ‘t’ and therefore because they aren’t hearing the sounds they may either omit the sounds in the words, or replace them with another sound. These high frequency sounds come up a lot in our language so they can be very hard to understand if a child isn’t using them. 

Often mild hearing loss is due to an infection.  When your child has an ear infection, they have fluid inside their middle ear.  The ear works through tiny moving pieces inside the middle ear.  When the ear fills up with fluid, those tiny pieces can’t move as well and the sound doesn’t pass to the brain as well.  Imagine turning on the radio and submerging your ears into a bath.  You may still be able to hear that there is music playing, but you probably won’t be able to understand the lyrics anymore.  That’s how it is when children have fluid in their ears.

In conclusion if you are at all concerned about your child’s attention, understanding, talking or sounds a great first step is getting their hearing checked to see if this could be impacting their communication development. They may have no problems with their hearing but it’s always worth checking in case. You can do this through your GP. If they do have hearing loss it may mean that they need a course of antibiotics to clear up and ear infection or monitoring to see how their hearing changes.