Speech screening of children in the dental office

Screening for speech problems in the dental office involves less than five minutes. Procedures include the sampling of a child's pronunciations in counting activities, word responses to pictures or questions, and conversational speech situations. Use of a normative sound development chart will help judge each child's pronunciation skills. Oral diadochokinetic testing provides a means of evaluating the maturational level of the neuromotor components of the oral structures used in support of sound production. Finally, the child's ability to modify sound production after stimulation, that is, his "stimulability," adds important data for determining the child's potential for outgrowing his problem. The screening assessment of these several characteristics of speech performance, then, provides sufficient diagnostic criteria for the dentist to recommend those children for speech therapy whose error productions will not likely improve through maturation alone. In instances where examination indicates that maturation should cause spontaneous improvement of speech, the dentist would then be able to inform the parents.