Stammering Natural In Developing Child

Press, Issue 31095, 25 June 1966, Page 2

Stammering Natural In Developing Child

Parents whose toddlers start stammering should not worry unduly. About 40 per cent of children aged between three and five years will stammer. Stammering should be regarded as a natural stage in a child’s speech development, according to the chief speech therapist of the United Oxford Hospitals, Miss Catherine Renfrew.

Miss Renfrew, who has spent the last two years at the University of Toronto lecturing to the faculty of medicine on speech therapy training, is visiting Christchurch before returning to England.

Young children did not have the vocabulary they needed to express themeslves and stumbled over words. Parents should not draw their children’s attention to this, but just accept it as natural. The children would outgrow the stammering phase. Studies had shown that parents who were overanxious and ambitious for their children and tried to hasten their speech and language development caused them to stammer, said Miss Renfrew.

Helping Development Miss Renfrew has this advice for parents who want to help children develop speech, language and vocabulary! “Parents should not push the child and make him or her feel self-conscious. They should make sure the child ( hears a good speech pattern from themselves.

“They should speak clearly and slowly, pausing between phrases and sentences to ensure the child hears and understands sounds. They should make a game of any corrections they feel they should make, but they should not persist too long at any one time in making the child learn new sounds.

“Speech training games between parents and child should always to be a mutual source of pleasure and not a chore,” said Miss Renfrew. Miss Renfrew has made a special study of the communication difficulties of mentally retarded children. She has found that a larger proportion of these children are deaf,

compared with children of normal intelligence. Another problem is that these children do not utilise their sense of hearing. They do not listen for difficult and I faint sounds and so do not ' distinguish between words which sound alike. ■ More recently Miss Renfrew 'has been studying the general development of speech and language. She has found that a number of children with normal intelligence have special language learning difficulties.

They have difficulty in acquiring a vocabulary and in expressing themselves in sentences and in sequence. Heredity also plays a part. Some families have a history of children being slow to learn to speak. Some children are not particularly interested in learning to speak, or in people and what they say. These children have found it more satisfying to concentrate on activities at which they have more skill.

Other children are shy and withdrawn and do not practice sounds and speech suffi-

ciently and they take longer to learn, said Miss Renfrew. Miss Renfrew became interested in speech therapy as a child. Her deep voice made her feel self-conscious. She took voice production lessons and this interested her in the question of why people spoke differently from each other and what could be done to help those with defects. She trained in Glasgow at the Sick Children’s Hospital and did post-graduate studies at the State University of lowa and at St Hilda's College, Oxford.

Miss Renfrew made a lecture tour of India in 1959-60. Speech problems were magnified by illiteracy, as the people in many cases, could not compensate for their speech defects by communicating their meaning in writing. Once back in Oxford at the base hospital, Churchill Hospital, Miss Renfrew will resume her normal routine. Two-thirds of her work is with adults and the rest with children.

She prefers to work with children as she can see the progress they make. Adults, on the other hand, who may have had strokes or cancer of the throat, to name two reasons for adult therapy, needed to be constantly given sup port and reassurance, and the results were not so dramatic.