If You Take Out the Front Teeth, Is That Going to Affect My Child’s Speech?
Dentition and Speech Sound Development
Baby Tooth
As you probably know, the first baby tooth appears when your child is around six months old. Your child will have twenty upper and lower teeth by the time they are three years old. Your children need their teeth to eat, chew food, and speak properly. But if baby teeth play such a crucial role in many of your child’s daily activities, including speech production, does that mean losing teeth, especially the front teeth, can make speech difficulties for your children?
Why Are Baby Teeth Important?
The fact that baby teeth will eventually fall out and be replaced by a set of permanent teeth does not reduce their importance in your child’s oral health and dental development.
Young children need their healthy primary teeth to:
- maintain good nutrition
- have future correctly-erupted adult teeth
- be confident about their smile
- speak clearly
Starting oral hygiene at a very young age (even before teething) and a regular dental check-up is great steps in keeping your baby’s teeth and gums healthy.
Causes of Premature Tooth Loss in Children
Your child’s first tooth is susceptible to decay as soon as it appears in the mouth. Early and regular dental checkups with a paediatric dentist in Brisbane and maintaining oral hygiene from a young age can prevent early childhood caries and improve your child’s oral health.
An accident, falling, or a blow to the face may also cause premature tooth loss in children.
Prevent Early Childhood Tooth Decay
Tooth decay causes permanent damage to the teeth and can be caused by having too many sugary foods and drinks. Early childhood caries, also known as baby bottle tooth decay, are common among young children and can be one of the causes of premature tooth loss.
Tooth decay can occur when the oral bacteria in your child’s mouth feed on the sugar from sugary stuff and produce acid. These acids will attack the outer layer of the tooth and lead to tooth decay and eventually tooth loss if not treated.
If tooth decay is left untreated, bacteria can spread to other teeth.
Teeth & Speaking
Your child’s teeth can affect speech development; therefore, missing them earlier than expected, especially the front teeth, may make certain sounds hard to make.
Below you can see some of the most common questions our Brisbane dentists have received from concerned parents regarding the issue:
- Does removing front teeth affect speech?
- Can missing teeth change your speech?
- What words are hard to say with no front teeth?
- Which teeth are most important for speech?
If you are worried about the impacts missing teeth have on your child’s speech and are willing to find out the answer to these questions, this article’s for you.
How Can Dental Issues Impact Speech?
Can Speech Be Affected by Missing Teeth?
The short answer will be: Yes, some speech difficulties may have a root in dental issues.
Many oral structures are involved in the process of speech sound production. Our teeth, palate, vocal tract, lips, jaw, tongue, and even cheeks are all involved and can affect our speech sound production. Therefore, it’s needless to mention that any damage or change in these structures may impact your child’s speaking and articulation of certain sounds.
Fricative sounds such as /s/, /z/, /f/, /v/, /th/, /sh/ and affricate sounds like /ch/, /j/ may be heard differently if your child has lost their front tooth.
For Your Information
- Please note that losing the front teeth may result in articulation differences, not the baby molars.
- Missing front teeth may result in mispronouncing some words like chin, fish, sew, and
- Losing the front teeth may only cause the child to produce some sounds and words differently; however, your child’s speech should still be mostly clear and easy to understand. If that’s not the case, please seek help from a speech pathologist.
Attention
While all parents enjoy babies’ mispronunciation of some words when they have just started speaking, they begin to worry if this difficulty lingers on and their child cannot talk at an age-appropriate level.
Children will typically be able to talk and pronounce speech sounds with no difficulties after their adult teeth erupt. If you notice your child’s inability to speak clearly even after getting all their teeth, you may need to seek help from a speech pathologist.
If your child’s speech is still unclear, even if your child’s teeth are all in their mouth, speech therapy may do the trick.
What Is A “Lisp”?
Lisp refers to the mispronunciation of words. Lisp is a speech error and is not a normal part of children’s speech development. Sometimes, tongue thrust, thumb sucking, or prolonged dummy use may be an underlying cause of lisping, but lisp can happen to any child.
For Your Information
A tongue-tie or jaw misalignment may also lead to lisps.
Tongue-Tie: A tongue-tie can occur if the strip of skin under the baby’s tongue is shorter than normal, limiting the tongue’s range of motion.
Jaw Misalignment: If your child has malocclusion or jaw misalignment, their upper and lower teeth don’t align well when the child closes their mouth.
Malocclusion has different types like:
Hereditary factors may cause a malocclusion, but the condition can also result from thumb-sucking or prolonged pacifier use.
Malocclusion may make certain sounds hard to produce, such as strident sounds.
Strident Sounds: These sounds are produced due to fast airflow against your teeth. (F, V, Z and Ch)
There are four different types of lips:
Lateral lisp
A lateral lisp may occur if air passes through either side of the child’s tongue. A lateral lisp is also referred to as a slushy or a wet lisp. This type of lisp affects the /s/ and /z/ sounds and in some cases it can affect other sounds like the /sh/, /ch/ and /j/ sounds.
To produce the /s/ and /z/ sounds, the sound of your child’s tongue must touch the back teeth (molars) to prevent air from escaping from the sides of the child’s mouth.
Palatal lisp
A palatal lisp occurs when your child’s tongue touches the soft palate when trying to produce the “s” or a “z” sounds.
Interdental lisp
An interdental lisp is when the child’s tongue pushes forward through the teeth. This type of lisp involves the tongue sticking out between the front teeth when the child is trying to make /s/ and /z/ sounds. In this situation, the actual sound that is heard is the /th/.
Dentalized lisp
A dentalised lisp occurs when the front of the child’s tongue pushes against the inside of the front teeth when they are trying to produce the /s/ and /z/ sounds.
Treatment
Speech Therapy
Some parents decide not to address their child’s lisping because it’s not a cause for concern. Lisp will not resolve on its own and, if left untreated and continues into adulthood, may impact the person’s social interactions. Besides, in most cases, young children with a lisp may feel self-conscious and embarrassed due to mispronouncing the sound /s/ or /z/.
Speech therapy or speech pathology refers to treating people (children) with speech disorders, and the person who specializes in this type of treatment is called a speech pathologist.
A speech-language pathologist will be able to address the problems with your child’s speech and help them along the way. You may need to seek help from orthodontists and speech pathologists if your child has problems with their dental development and speech sound development.
