The human nervous system is very complex. Nervous system consists of a net made of billion interconnected neurons, which are distributed all over the whole body. It is divided into the central and the peripheral nervous system.
The most important is the brain, which anatomically consists of two hemispheres, each being specialized for specific functions. The sprouting of brain begins already ten weeks before the child is born and lasts till the age of 2. In the first months of life they are most malleable and vulnerable, but at the same time this is also when the child's learning abilities are the biggest.
The individual sensor systems (t.i. vestibular, proprioceptive, tactile, visual, audible …) are interconnected. It was already Piaget, who said that the biggest influence on the individual is made by the senso-motoric learning from the childhood until the adulthood. For an individual to manage the everyday life, the sense organs have to function as interconnected and consistent. The sensory processing refers to the neurological processes in the brain, which are necessary to control the stimuluses from the different sensory systems. One of the components of the sensory processing is also the sensory integration, which is responsible for the smooth information exchange in the brain. It can happen that an individual overreacts to certain impulses and starts to avoid them or he underreacts and therefore searches for these impulses even more.
The reasons for the beginnings of the articulation disorders (inability to produce some sounds) are varied, e.g. complications in the motor skill production centres (tongue/hard palate/muscular tissue). There are also problems of the sensory integration, which mediate the feedback information and problems with the central nervous system processing in certain brain areas (e.g. stroke, paralysis etc.).
In the empirical part, the emphasis was to research the connection of articulation and phonological disorders by processing some tactile, vestibular and proprioceptive, auditory, oral and visual functions. We would like to know how these mentioned disorders influence the articulation correctness. For parents we used an adapted and translated questionnaire from the English version of Sensory Processing Disorder Checklist: Signs and Symptoms of Dysfunction, which consists of 6 parts. With the given consensus of parents about their children participating in the research, we evaluated 61 children. According to the given criteria, they were listed into the control group (children with no disorders) and the experimental group (children with articulation and/or phonological disorders).
The results of the research showed that the children with articulation and/or phonological disorders in general exhibit more tactile and vestibular disorders, which coincides with the foreign authors researches. However, on some others ranges that we tested, we did not get the results that would point that the number of disorders is higher than with the control group. Statistically important differences became obvious in the area of proprioceptive and oral disorders.
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