My daughter is mildly retarded and slurs her words. It is sort of mumbling at times where she is not annunciating the whole word. Would speech therapy help this? At her school (she is 12) they have said that those problems could not be addressed by speech therapy as they were not considered speech problems.
Check out oral-motor therapy
at http://www.oromotorsp.com. There is a new book out this year entitled “Oral-Motor Exercises for Speech Clarity” by Sara Rosenfeld-Johnson. It can be used at home by a parent (need to buy manipulatives for specific problems) or by a speech therapist who will incorporate it into practice. You probably wouldn’t be able to get a school to do this. The book is written in such a way that an interested parent would be able to use the exercises, even without a speech therapist. However, you might want to find a private speech therapist to help you.
Mary
Re: Mental Retardation/ speech therapy HELP
Thank you for your input! What exactly is oral motar excersises? Yes shee does seem worse when she is tiered and she does have a tongue thrust problem. What are neurological ptogramming problems? She is mildly retarded and has several problems with retrival and short term memory. Thank you again!
She may have oral-motor issues in regards to strength of her tongue and muscles of her mouth that are preventing her from articultating precisely. Does this happen when she is tired or all the time? Does she have any other neurological programming problems? Does she present with tongue thrust or an open mouth and frontal resting tongue position? It is hard to say what will help. Sometimes oral-motor exercises help people with weak musculature to articulate better but I am not sure of the extent of your daughters problems.