Does Oral Motor Exercises Help Speech Development

Oral motor as a stepping stone
Oral motor exercises should be a middle step towards speech production. We use it because it’s difficult for a child to produce certain sounds, and therefore teaching the skills leading up to those sounds is the best thing we can do. By breaking down the motion of our oral muscles when we speak, we can find some easier motions that we can target.

Motor to speech transition
For every oro-motor task, you must have a speech goal in mind. Or else, you are really just teaching oral motor muscles (more on that below). If you try to really feel how the mouth moves when we talk, you will realize that it doesn’t really move that much. Especially vowels, our lips have minimal movement and actually, the tongue does most of the job. The funny thing is, there’s more than one way we can achieve the same sound with our mouth. So we must practice the sounds right after we try the oro-motor exercises.

You practice what you get
At the end of the day, the final goal is to teach the child to talk. There isn’t a point if the child can bite on a tube 10 times per side if the speech abilities don’t improve. It’ll be a different story for chewing and swallowing cases though. The example we give all the time is if you’re trying to learn how to dunk a basketball, of course, you’d be doing a lot of squats and strength exercises. However, if you do not try to dunk and fail, you’d never be able to do it properly. It doesn’t matter if you have the strongest legs ever, the skill is learned when you try it over and over again.

[viandviand]

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[sonalijana]

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