I have not seen this Virginia but it makes complete sense to me. I am a resource teacher and I have often worked with children with cerebral palsy who would have had reduced oral motor control. For those children phonics - teaching letter sounds - was almost useless as a means of teaching the children to read. We have speculated that when the children could not form the sounds properly, the nthey couldn't discriminate the words properly. 

I recently came across a 4 year old child, developmentally abled and very bright, whose speech was completely unclear. Jack was Dack. He was unable to move his tongue from side to side without moving the lower jaw. This led me to speculate, given my experience with children who had cerebral palsy, if snipping a tongue tie at the time it was obvious it was impeding speech was too late. That is, if we wait until a child is about 5 to perform the frenotomy, is it too late for the development of the neural pathways that control the discrimination between sounds?

There is a graph entitled Sensitive Periods in EArly Brain Development. Devised by the late Hertzman, it summarises the research on ages by which certain capacities develop in infants and when intervention is most beneficial. The graph can be seen on this page: http://www.reginakids.ca/child-development-and-parenting

If I am right in my observations, and I think this is what Virginia said the British Columbia study said, that a compromised ability to form sounds impedes auditory discrimination, then the effects of a tongue tie could be far reaching.

Eithne Murray,
Carlow, Ireland

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