Speech and Language Delay

Here’s how speech and language delay symptoms may also be explained by retained primitive reflexes and incomplete lower brain development.

Children who fail to meet the developmental milestones for language development and who have incomprehensible speech after three years of age, difficulties with placing words in a sentence in the correct order, problems with articulation, and distortion of certain sounds may be missing several automatic functions that are associated with a well-organized brain. For example, articulation and intonation are functions of the midbrain, so they can be affected if such development is incomplete.

Moreover, a child’s brain will be preoccupied with survival if primitive reflexes are still active, pons and midbrain development are incomplete, and sensory processing is poor. Natural language development may be put on hold since the brain can only attend to so much at one time. If we are put in the position of having to select survival or language, we are wired to choose the former.