Myofunctional approach to speech correction in children with orofacial disorders

Preschool children often have various orofacial disorders, such as shortened length or anomalous attachment of the tongue frenum, amymicity of the lips, flattened nasolabial fold, supernumerary teeth, hypotonic/hypertonicity of the orbicular muscle. Therefore, the correction work on the sound pronunciation of preschool children depends on the specific anomaly in the structure of the speech apparatus. The sooner disease is disclosed, the easier it is for orthodontic treatment and speech therapy. At the same time, 30 % of preschool children at the age of 7 do not recover from the disease, and 40 % of treatment is resulted in the disease recurrence. Only 30 % of children get a positive (satisfactory) result. The article reveals the features of the speech development of children with orofacial disorders that affect their speech development, which indicates the need to use the "INFANT" trainer in speech-language therapy for the prevention of dento-maxillofacial anomalies and correction of persistent sound pronunciation problems. It also helps to increase the effectiveness of all speech-language therapy work aimed at correcting the expressive side of speech not only in children with normal speech development or phonetic-phonemic disorders, but also in children with systemic speech impairment.