Jane Wilson (MMed, BMed, PGCert,) is a specialist in speech and language therapy, She has worked in schools, and community clinics and provides guidance to parents and teachers in early children’s speech and language therapy. In a YouTube video conference provided by ED Psych 4 Kids titled: “Speech Delay During the Pandemic: How to help Under 5s” Jane Wilson depicts the important behavioral factors in the pandemic that led to the increase in speech delay. In the video at 20 minutes and 39 seconds, Jane Wilson says: “Really importantly this reduced opportunities reduced exposure to new vocabulary, because we had few activities, restrictions in seeing extended family, and setting closures. And it has really counted because children learn vocabulary by repeated exposure.” (Wilson, 2021). According to Wilson, the lack of social interactions and opportunities for children because of the pandemic restrictions, has affected the decrease in the development of new vocabulary. Children do not get to hang out and participate in activities that will help their verbal communication. Another important quote is when she explains how masks have affected the visual part of speech development in young children: “For our young children what we know is that that visual feedback alongside everything that they are hearing, alongside their auditory, it is important also getting visual feedback from what you are doing with your articulacy..they are starting to see more and more children, especially this cohort, starting with very unclear speech, and I’m wondering whether this is part of this dampening effect of the mask.” (Wilson, 2021). The author makes a great point here making a reflection of the behavioral factors during the pandemic that lead to the decrease in speech development. The speaker illustrates the idea that wearing a mask affected the way children learned to speak during the pandemic, as they did not have that visual component of seeing others pronounce and articulate their words. The visual part when learning to speak is very important and Jane Wilson is correct with her point about wearing masks during the pandemic because if children are not able to see how a person is pronouncing a word, they will not be able to effectively articulate and create the exact pronunciation.
Dani Dumitriu, MD, PhD, is a pediatrician in the Well Baby Nursery at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. He researched the potential risks of developmental delay in children born during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dani Dumitriu states: “Risk for developmental delay is increased among pandemic-born infants, especially among females and within the Communication and Personal-Social domains. Healthcare and education systems will need to be prepared to provide additional resources to support these infants as they develop” (Dumitriu, 2022) “PdP infants also had significantly higher risk for developmental delay (Table 1) in the Communication and Personal-Social domains, where the odds ratios for scoring 2 SD below the mean were 2.5 and 1.5, respectively, relative to pre-pandemic data. When stratified by sex, the odds ratios for risk of developmental delay were generally higher among female infants” (Dimitru, 2022). He emphasizes well how the pandemic had an impact on children born during that time. This is important because this demonstrates the increase in developmental delay in children born during the pandemic but also how female infants were at higher risk.
Published on March 14, 2023, doctors wrote a research paper about the secondary impacts of the pandemic. The research studies the exponential increase in speech delay diagnosis in infants during, and after the pandemic. In the results, page 2 of the research states: “Increases in speech disorder diagnoses were most significant in infants and toddlers ages 0 to 2. This age group saw a 136% increase in new diagnoses in 2022, compared with the pre-pandemic rate. Children ages 3 to 5 made up the largest portion of patients with new speech disorder diagnoses both before and after the onset of the pandemic, but the rate more than doubled in this group as well, increasing by 107%.” Followed, a graph titled: “Diagnosis of Speech Language Disorders In Ages 0-12”. According to the graph, it is very clear the fact that by 2022, the number of diagnoses of speech-language disorders will double since 2018. Going from 500,000 to over 1,250,000.
In my research, I found that there was an exponential increase in children’s speech-language development. I learned about some of the factors that led to this increase like the decrease in opportunities and social interactions, as well as mask wearing. I had already expected a large increase but I definitely did not expect it to more than double. My understanding of my question changed in a way that first I thought it would just be environmental, social, and physical factors that led to an increase in speech delay but there is also a relationship to income in families that led to this. What I learned is very important because these are things that we have known that affected new generations and children born during the pandemic. Also, this will be seen in the future as something strange and since it has reasoning that’s why we should understand it now. Families, doctors, and teachers should know about this information because it has been seen a lot more these years and affecting new generations.
