The start of acquiring language and speech is clearly the sense of hearing. Through listening the infant learns about language and will eventually wish to imitate the speech of his or her caretakers.
If you are concerned about speech delay, a speech impediment or other language or speech related issues, please always first check with a medical practitioner and check the hearing of the child. Hearing loss, very sensitive or distorted hearing will all impact on language acquisition and speech development. The medical profession often can help with hearing loss, but mostly ignores sensitive or distorted hearing.
It is scientifically proven that sounds received by the right ear are mainly processed in the left side of the brain and sounds received by the left ear mainly in the right side of the brain. Furthermore, most language processing takes place in the left side of the brain, in two distinct areas, Wernicke's area for written and spoken language understanding and Broca's area for speech production. Damage to either of these areas mostly results in the loss of language understanding or loss of speech. Other parts of the brain and various inter-connections also play an important role, however.
There is a growing body of evidence that people with language disorders, including Dyslexia and speech delay, often attempt to process too much of the auditory language input in the right side of the brain and that the synchronisation or speed of signal transfer between the two sides of the brain is less than optimal. Medically this is referred to as Auditory Processing Disorders (APD).
Training the brain to make more and faster connections between the two sides, and strengthening the specialised language centres in the left side whilst inhibiting the right side from processing speech, can help to reduce the effects of APD. The unique SAS music and language programmes have been specifically designed to address these areas.