Music is helping 5-year-old Emma Aylward communicate.
Music is bringing the words back to the lips of a little girl robbed of her ability to communicate.
Every little word 5-year-old Emma Aylward speaks is significant. There was a time she didn't speak at all. But life didn't start off that way.
Emma was actually perfectly normal and typical for a full year after being born. At 10 months, she started to say "Hi Daddy." But that wouldn't last long. When she was 1, she had her first seizure.
"And then later on she developed infantile spasms which is one of the catastrophic epilepsies of childhood," said Sinead Aylward, Emma's mother.
It would turn out to be a brain abnormality triggering the violent seizures. To stop them, Emma would have to have brain surgery at the age of 2, bringing a huge set back in her speech. But then something happened.
"We had been in speech therapy for about two years, three years at that point and had had zero success. Nobody really got her and Nancy got her in five minutes," said Aylward.
"I really wanted her to say mommy. I don't think that her mother had ever heard her say it or at least not for a lot of time so I just started to say mommy," said Nancy Kaufman.
Kaufman, speech and language pathologist and founder of the Kaufman Children's Center, connected with Emma immediately by encouraging her to sing instead of speak.
"It was so exciting and then what we have to do is then fade out the melody so that I can just say it, 'this is the way we' -- and then she can say read a book without the melody and so now she only needs melody as a cue when she's stuck," said Kaufman.
Now after months of intense therapy, Emma is interacting in a whole new way.
"Instead of reaching or grabbing for the iPad, we would want her to say, ‘I want iPad,' and she would get the iPad for a minute. Or if we offered her a toy that she didn't want, instead of just tossing it, we would prompt her to say, 'put it away' or 'no thank you' and she was able to do that," said speech pathologist Kerry Peterson.
"Just moments where I think everybody takes for granted in their child -- I mean everybody celebrates 'momma' -- but just all these little things of you know, 'I want TV,' or 'I want a cookie' or 'I want this' or 'I want that' -- just hearing those words, I mean... we just jump up and down and scream and shout. There's a lot of cheers in our house," said Sinead Aylward.
Emma is now going into kindergarten, so this will be a very exciting time for her. Her parents know to keep the progress rolling they have to continue the therapy at home and that's what they're going to do.
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Music is helping 5-year-old Emma Aylward communicate.
