Speech sound development follows a normal developmental sequence. By four years of age, children should be understood 100% of the time by unfamiliar listeners. "One hundred percent intelligibility does not mean perfectly normal speech; it means understandable speech in the presence of misarticulations of sounds not learned until 5 or 6 years of age, such as /r/ and /s/."
When children are difficult to understand, it can be challenging for their parents or caregivers and may even be frustrating for the child.
Tips for Parents:
If you are concerned about your child's speech sound development, please feel free to contact me to discuss your concerns.
Be a good speech model. If your child says: "I want to do pay", model the correct way to say it "Okay, let's go play", while placing added emphasis on the sounds previously misarticulated. Then...move on with the conversation...do not stop your child and have them correct the sounds. This way, the conversation can move on uninterrupted yet a good speech model has still been provided.
See below for a quick visual on how much of your child's speech should be understood:
Pie charts were adapted by Alicia K. McFalls, M.S.CCC-SLP from Weiss,C. and Lillywhite, H. Communication Disorders, St. Louis: C. V. Mosy Company 1976, p. 51
When Stuck in Articulation Remediation: To Oral-Motor, Please Go!
When I went to graduate school, Oral-Motor was old news. We didn't need it...five years into my pediatric experience, I realized something was missing. Countless students did great in traditional articulation therapy, but there were those few who just couldn't move their sounds to conversation, or just could not master /r/ or perhaps they had the dreaded lateral lisp. I had exhausted my bag of tricks. Then came ASHA in Austin, Tx (I know....I date myself) and time spent with Char Boshart training a huge room full of SLPs on her Motor Activities for Children in Articulation Therapy (MA-CAT). She was excited, and you know how it is...I was excited, its contagious at those conferences with all the possible new ideas and strategies to help our awesome speech kiddos! So back to my kiddos I traipsed with MA-CAT in hand...it works. I used it with my kiddos that were stuck in artic. and they graduated from speech shortly upon completion of the oral motor program.
I have modified and adapted the exercises over the years. Boshart has divided it into twelve steps by groups of sounds being targeted. My kiddos like it and see success with practice very quickly. Kiddos that do not practice but work only in therapy also see success (it just takes longer).
Step one for /r/ is used with kids who can tolerate touch on the back of their tongue without gagging. I skip to step four for kids with hypersensitive gag reflexes. We progress on through step twelve. I usually begin drill and practice of /r/ by week nine or ten. I probe production of /r/ briefly, but do NOT drill and practice until the student can achieve a beautiful /r/ or any sound that I am targeting. As SLP's we should not be having our kiddos drill and practice a poorly produced sound in the hopes that a correctly produced sound will appear. We need to establish the correctly produced sound FIRST, then practice that. The MA-CAT helps our kiddos achieve that correctly produced sound we all long for. What about the I.E.P. that asks us to target /s/ at the word level? Well, we are addressing /s/ using oral-motor to establish stimulability for correct placement. It is okay! Oral-motor is a precursor or building block to that goal.
We need to strengthen these articulator muscles of the tongue, lips, and jaw as well establish the ability to disassociate our lips from our tongue and our tongue from our jaw. Our articulators have to move so quickly during connected speech in order to get to the right spot at the right time that it is like running a race. Do we need to exercise our bodies to win a race? Yes! Then why not exercise our articulators to produce connected speech?
No comments:
Post a Comment