Sometimes, when a child has problems with speech, doctors make the following diagnosis: OHP. What it is and how it manifests itself, why children suffer from this ailment, we will consider in detail in this material. You will also learn what classes you need to attend if you have this diagnosis, how you can adjust the speech of the kids.
ONR: what is it
The indicated abbreviation means general underdevelopment of speech. This is a disease characterized by symptoms such as the unformed function of the sounds made by the child and the meaning that he wants to convey with their help. In addition, pathologies of lexical-grammatical and phonemic processes are noted with him, the baby can not coordinate words, pronounce certain letters, etc.
However, the peculiarities of children with OHP are not just speech defects, to some extent characteristic of many at preschool age, but also deep types of pathology, which, if not addressed, can lead to more serious disorders - dyslexia and dysgraphia, in which the child will not be able to master the technique of writing.
Also, the disease should be distinguished from such a phenomenon as phonetic-phonemic underdevelopment. OH itself often manifests itself against the background of syndromes such as:
- alalia (complete or practical lack of speech);
- rhinolalia (problems with articulation and voice formation);
- dysarthria (impaired pronunciation);
- aphasia (when an already formed speech function disappears).
Reasons for the appearance of OHP
A speech therapist, as a rule, during examination can identify the cause that provoked this phenomenon in the child. Many of them relate to the period of pregnancy in the mother, in particular:
- severe toxicosis;
- smoking and drinking while carrying;
- the use of harmful drugs;
- incompatibility of blood groups of mother and child;
- birth trauma or pathology;
- diseases of the central nervous system in a baby at an early age.
Among other causes that cause speech impairment, poor conditions for raising a child are highlighted, as well as frequent infectious diseases, including stomatitis.
The most severe form, which requires special attention and treatment, is OHP, acquired in the uterine period or in the first year of life. Control is very important here. Do not forget that the normal development of speech of children with OHP is impossible without regular classes at a speech therapist and examinations.
How to identify the disease?
A lot of parents whose children at one age or another do not start talking when their peers in full call objects, sound the alarm. Sometimes it is completely unreasonable, because if there are no pathologies, the child will speak sooner or later. But how to determine the presence of OHP? What it is and how it looks in practice, let's check:
- if the childās speech is incomprehensible to adults and difficult to understand, and this is not an age-related phenomenon;
- when you see that he understands you well, but cannot say anything in return;
- the beginnings of speech begin to form from 4-5 years old;
- if during a conversation the baby cannot coordinate the elementary forms of cases with each other (for example, a good girl, five houses, a beautiful sun).
For any of the above manifestations, immediately lead the child to a speech therapist, and also, if necessary, to a pathologist and neuropsychiatrist. The doctor should examine him and determine if there are OHP and other signs of delayed speech development.
Disease classification
So, depending on the clinical manifestations of the child, one or another OHP group may be assigned to him. There are three of them:
- uncomplicated (there is a minimum of dysfunctions, there is little regulation of muscle tone, immaturity of emotions and will is noted, etc.);
- complicated (in the presence of neurological and psychopathic disorders, expressed, for example, convulsions, cerebral palsy and other syndromes);
- gross violation (organic types of damage to the part of the brain that is responsible for speech, in particular, with alalia).
With OHR, disease levels are also distinguished depending on the childās ability to speak:
- the first (when children do not speak at all);
- the second (there is speech, but it is extremely poor, there is agramatism - violation of the use of case forms, the dictionary is poor in age);
- third (phrases can be developed, but there are problems in sound and sense);
- the fourth (a series of gaps in phonetics, vocabulary and grammar in colloquial speech).
About each of the levels of this ailment we will tell in more detail.
Against the background of what may be the general underdevelopment of speech in a child?
The characteristic of OHP is such that often this phenomenon can appear against the background of the following diseases:
- rhesus conflict;
- asphyxia;
- intrauterine hypoxia;
- traumatic brain injuries.
The speech of children with OHP differs from ordinary ones, some of them begin to pronounce their first words no earlier than three years, while a year or two is considered the norm. They speak less than their peers, slowly and incorrectly.
Very often, such violations can significantly affect the development of other mental processes: memory, the process of learning new things , etc. There is also motor dysfunction or impaired coordination of movements. The child practically does not talk, walks little, is not interested in what he owes at his age: toys, books, does not ask parents questions, does not reach out to communicate with peers, motor skills also suffer greatly.
OHP and its consequences can be not only the result of certain pathologies in the mother during pregnancy or during childbirth. Often the cause of the ailment is a social factor, when parents pay little attention to the child and do not talk with him. The less communicate with the baby, the later he will begin to say: this truth is known to many.
Features of the course of severe forms of OHP
Disease levels differ from each other depending on the degree of speech damage. There are four of them, the first and second are the heaviest.
The first level is characterized by a complete lack of coherent speech, regardless of the age of the child. He uses for communication something similar to babble, as well as pieces of sounds that have no meaning. Vocabulary rarely when includes at least a few meaningful words, it is more onomatopoeia and complexes.
It is extremely difficult to utter at least one meaningful word to a child with such a diagnosis, since the phonemic process is only at the initial stage (akin to babies under two years old).
But at the second level, the speech of children with OHP is already more meaningful, although it is far from ideal. At the very least, they can produce not only babbling, but also some simple sound constructions of up to three words.
As a rule, children in this form of OHP do not know what the singular and plural are, they are constantly confused, cannot name one or another subject, do not speak the matching part of the language, and do not decline words when necessary. As a rule, the vast majority of babies at a similar age have no problems with this.
There is a distortion of sounds, their replacement, as a result of which even an adult cannot understand what he is talking about, and the child is simply not able to analyze his conversational process.
Work with children with severe speech damage
For development, special classes are assigned with children with OHP of the first two levels.
They are designed to solve problems such as:
- the formation of the makings of attention to speech;
- syllable development;
- ability to distinguish and reproduce sounds;
- phonemic perception promotion;
- the ability to produce elementary speech word forms;
- expanding the vocabulary of the child;
- mastering the simplest grammatical units.
Also for classes, depending on the age and degree of the disease, this or that technique is characteristic. OHP is treated by performing exercises such as:
- calling sounds and their automation;
- practical development of the syllabic structure of words;
- the ability to understand the design of speech at the level of vocabulary and grammar and much more.
Speech Disorders Level 3
At this level, there is already a more coherent speech of children with OHP, and those around them can at least understand what they mean.
This form of the disease is characterized by the use of simple monosyllabic sentences, but it is already difficult to build heavier grammatical constructions with great difficulty. In particular, it is extremely difficult for a child to master the pronunciation of participles and participles, to learn the logical and causal relationships of objects in communication with other people.
At this level of OHP, he can be able to use almost all parts of speech during a conversation, and he mostly pronounces the names of things and phenomena around him correctly. The key words in the reserve are nouns and verbs, but adjectives with adverbs can be used extremely rarely. There are errors in prepositions, conjunctions, coordination, wrong accents are made in words.
The mildest form of the disease
The fourth level is the easiest, however, preschoolers with OHP are even harder than other children to master the preparation for learning. They are significantly behind their peers in terms of speech development.
Globally, there are no serious violations with this form, moreover, the childās vocabulary is relatively large. But he does not know and does not understand what are synonyms, antonyms, can not remember a single aphorism and is not able to catch their essence, even if it takes a long time to explain. Similarly, the situation may be with the perception of puzzles, because logical thinking suffers greatly.
A characteristic feature is skipping to secondary details when telling about something and skipping key moments of the action, frequent repetitions of what was mentioned earlier. That is why classes with children with OHP of this type should be held regularly and include such techniques as retelling of texts and other ways of forming descriptive thinking and the ability to voice the idea.
Diagnosis of a disease at a speech therapist
In most cases, a speech therapist and other doctors prescribe an OHP examination, which includes a general diagnosis of the childās speech and each of the physiological processes involved in its formation.
The preliminary stage of this study consists in a conversation with parents regarding the characteristics of pregnancy and childbirth, as well as the social conditions for raising a child: how often they talk to him, what vocabulary they use in communication, and much more.
Then a diagnostic examination of the speech is performed and it is specified how the components of the speech system are formed in the current case. For this, the degree of connectedness of the conversation is first studied by asking to describe the picture in your own words or to name objects.
Next, the structure of the speech apparatus is examined and correlated with motility, measures are taken to diagnose auditory-speech memory, as well as other mental processes in the child.
After all, a conclusion is made from a speech therapist, which indicates the level of OHP and related factors, if any. The examination will help calm down those parents who took a delay in speech development for this disease , which is characterized by only a slow pace of formation of the childās conversational skills, but there are no violations.
Corrective measures
For therapeutic purposes, an event such as correction of OHP is carried out. What is it and how it is carried out, we will present below.
At the first level, the emphasis is on the development of an understanding of the appeal to the child and the activation of independent pronunciation. This is not about correctness from a phonetic point of view, but a certain meaning is given to grammar in order to correctly memorize the structure of words.
If children have OHP level 2, the correction includes the formation of the ability to build phrases and distinguish lexical structures, the sound pronunciation is clarified, there is a desire for the absence of the use of extra characters in a particular word.
In the third, the coherence of speech develops and the phonemic perception of the conversation improves. Children are preparing for the correct mastering of grammar.
But with the mildest form of OHP - at the fourth level - corrective measures are aimed at ensuring that speaking abilities correspond to the norm by age, the study of writing skills of letters and words, as well as the basics of reading, is practiced.
At the first two levels of the disease, school-age children cannot learn on a par with their peers and require special attention. To do this, there are educational institutions for special categories of students, where teachers pay close attention to overcoming existing problems. With OHP of the third level, you can study in a regular school, but in special correctional classes, and in the fourth such a child can freely go to first grade along with peers, but regularly attend classes at a speech therapist.
Visual modeling as a method of treating OHR in older preschool children: indications for use
Speech therapists after carrying out diagnostic measures for children with OHP of the third and fourth form mainly note the presence of the following manifestations:
- coherent sentences are very brief;
- inconsistency of statements;
- fragments of the text may not have a logical and causal relationship;
- small informative base.
Also, children often with pleasure in colors tell about how they spent the summer or visited an amusement park, but they can not write an essay on this topic. And not because they are little aware of something, but due to the lack of the ability to design memories into related grammatically correctly constructed constructions.
That is why speech therapists often use visual modeling as a method of improving speech skills in OHP. Thanks to him, children can learn to perceive various abstract concepts as visual images, because, according to many experts in their industry, at an early age visual material is absorbed much faster than verbal.
The concept of visual modeling
Visual simulation is the material reproduction of the properties of an object, including the following steps:
- analysis of an abstract concept;
- its translation into sign language;
- work with modeling.
In speech therapy, this method is used as a way to learn new words, as well as with the aim of learning new environmental phenomena for young children. This is especially important for those children suffering from OHP who were deprived of communication by their parents and paid little attention to them in terms of developing perceptions of the world.
For senior preschool age, in order to replenish the vocabulary and improve speech functions, tasks such as retelling the text, drawing up your own story from the picture, description of an action are offered.
The experience of specialists has shown that with OHP, exercises using visual modeling can, in many cases, significantly adjust vocabulary and bring communication skills closer to normal for their age.
When don't you need to sound the alarm?
It is only natural that the fears of parents are far from always justified. For example, if your two-year-old child is able to pronounce only single words, and the neighborās kid is already tormenting people around with questions about the arrangement of the world, then itās quite possible that after only a couple of months the situation will change dramatically, and you will no longer have any worries will be.
However, to be sure, it is better to visit a doctor and conduct appropriate diagnostic measures to find out if such a delay is normal in your case or not.
Similarly, it is impossible to take for OHP the childās inability to pronounce a certain letter, most often this refers to āpā. Such a defect, of course, cannot be overlooked, it must be treated by a speech therapist. Otherwise, he may remain for life. However, not pronouncing one letter does not entail global speech disorders.
As you can see, OHP in most cases can be cured and corrected if the childās parents pay attention to the disease in time and take this problem seriously. Also, the guarantee of normal development is the course of pregnancy, during which the expectant mother should lead a healthy lifestyle and not be exposed to all kinds of risks.