Super Star Speech

A child with an articulation disorder may have six or eight or even more different sound errors. When a speech pathologist is making a treatment plan, where does he or she begin?

First, an articulation test is given to the child. This test will assess every sound in every word position. Then the speech pathologist will determine whether the sound is stimulable–whether the child can imitate the sound. Then the sound errors will be compared to normative data to determine whether each sound should even be mastered by the child’s age. For example, if a 3 year old cannot pronounce /r/, that is not a concern, because 3 year olds are not expected to produce this difficult sound. This articulation sounds chart will give you some guidelines on the ages at which various sounds should be mastered.

Traditionally, treatment begins with 1-4 sounds that are stimulable and early developing. When the initial sounds are mastered, treatment moves on to sounds that are later developing and/or not stimulable. There are many variables, however. For example, if a child produced a sound correctly 50% of the time, I would assume that it might be mastered eventually without assistance, so I would choose a sound with which the child had more difficulty. I might choose a sound that was in the child’s name or another sound important in the child’s life, even though it might not fit the usual criteria.

Current research in speech pathology is leading in another direction. Some speech pathologist are advocating teaching sounds that are the most difficult, that are not stimulable, and that are not similar to each other. Although this can be more frustrating for the child and initial progress may seem slow, evidence is showing that this method results in learning transfer to sounds that are never worked with in therapy, shortening the overall time needed in therapy.

Overall, I really think that the most important point is for a child who needs speech therapy to get it. Any child who is learning and practicing new sounds will make progress, while a child whose speech disorder is neglected may not improve on his own.

Some speech sounds are very similar.  Two different sounds may be produced with the exact same tongue movement. They may be explosive, short sounds, like t, k, and p. Or they may be stretched out “sibilant” sounds like s or f.  When a speech pathologist (SLP) evaluates a child’s articulation, not only does he or she listen to and evaluate every speech sound, but the SLP will analyze the errors for patterns of mispronunciation. This will often help him or her devise the best and most efficient therapy plan.

Sounds that differ from each other by only one feature are referred to by speech pathologists as “minimal pairs.”  The most common minimal pairs used in speech therapy are the voiced/unvoiced sound pairs. Speech sounds can be produced with the voice on (all vowels, /r/, /l/, /z/, etc.) or with the voice off (/s/, /t/, /k/, etc.).  There are many English sounds that are actually almost identical to another sound in their production. The only difference is whether the voice is “turned on” or “turned off.”

Say, “sssssss.”  You didn’t use your voice, did you? Now say, “ssssss” and turn on your voice. The /s/ just turned into a /z/!  The placement of the tongue and the manner of articulation is identical for the two sounds. Only the voicing is different. This is something that never occurred to me until I was taking courses in speech pathology, so I thought it might be new information for my reader, too!

These are the minimal pairs that differ only in voicing.

p, b

t, d

k, g

s,z,

ch, j

th (thin), th (that)

f, v

When a child is in speech therapy, the voiced/unvoiced pairs will usually be taught at the same time. It is very common, for example, for a child to work on  the /s/ and /z/ sounds together. Practicing one of these sounds will reinforce the other.  At other times, the speech pathologist will choose to focus on sounds that have a different common feature, such as voiced sounds or tongue-tip sounds. Alternatively, the SLP may choose several sounds that have no common features–this procedure has been shown to encourage the acquisition of many sounds that aren’t even addressed!