142 Yoga for Speech-Language Development
communication, breath support, motor planning, vocabulary/
concepts, symbolic play, and emergent literacy. With the logical
relationship of yoga to these six developmental domains addressed
in the foregoing chapters, and our awareness of the lack of data
to support these connections in the contemporary literature,
we conclude this book with a call for evidence from research-
oriented children’s yoga instructors and clinicians with interest in
using yoga to enhance speech-language development in children.
We realize that the first generation of research in this area will
necessarily be exploratory, but that is an appropriate way to
begin to address this potentially powerful complement to typical
speech, language, and communication development as well as
traditional speech-language intervention. Amidst its growing
popularity, the stakeholders in this endeavor include children of
all ages as well as the families and professionals who serve them.
As Bill Gates (2000) noted in a keynote address, “any tool that
enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how
people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the
kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.”