Do you have trouble understanding what your child is saying?
she says “yion” instead of “lion” or make mistakes with other sounds?
Does your child stay out of school or on the playground because other kids can’t figure it out?
It’s frustrating for both you and your child when you can’t figure it out and have to ask multiple questions just to get it straight. Here are the main reasons why we often explain to our speech therapy clients why their child has unclear speech:
Muscular weakness.
Several muscles are involved when speech occurs, and sometimes the inability to move these muscles can cause speech to be unclear. For example, your child may not be able to lift the tip of his tongue to produce the ‘I’ sound.
Control and Coordination.
The problem may not be muscle weakness, but rather your child having trouble coordinating movements. This is similar to people who cannot dance. Actually, there is nothing wrong with their legs, but they dance ‘with two left feet’. Therefore, your child may be able to tell ‘I’ in ‘lion’ but unable to say ‘I’ in “caterpillar”. Or I could say ‘lion’ for a minute and ‘yion’ the next, and ‘Will’ the next.
Phonological difficulties.
It is more about having a cognitive concept of sounds, as opposed to the physical aspect of producing speech. For example, if your child grew up speaking or hearing Mandarin Chinese, they might say ‘hoo-‘ instead of ‘home’ or ‘cat-‘ instead of ‘catch’.
It is not that I am incapable of producing the ‘-I know’ or the ‘-ch’ sound; it is simply because there are no such final sounds in Mandarin and therefore it makes it more difficult for you to understand the concept that there are final sounds in English.
Why is speech therapy important?
A speech therapist is a professional who is specifically trained to diagnose and treat speech problems in children (and adults). Speech therapy is important because:
1. Make your life easier
2. Eliminate the vicious circle: unclear speech causes less interaction and therefore less voice input and worse speech and language.
When your child has unclear speech, this can result in less interaction with other children, resulting in even worse speech and language due to lack of practice. Even adults attend speech therapy classes just for this reason.
3. It affects the way your child learns to read.
Instead of learning that the letter ‘s’ has the sound in ‘sock’, for example if you say ‘values’ instead, you may end up thinking that the letter ‘s’ have a ‘you’ sound.
The 4 guiding principles of speech therapy
Teaching a child with unclear speech may be different from how you teach other children in your family. You may need to repeat more often and emphasize the sounds more. Here are some things we regularly use in speech therapy when addressing your child’s unclear speech:
Please note that clear speech sounds are reduced to oral motor movements of the tongue or lips or other speech muscles. (It’s not ‘All About That Bass’ it’s ‘All About The Place’!) The placement of the tongue, that is.
We make different speech sounds in tongue twisters (“She sells seashells at the seashore”) and in everyday speech because we can move our tongues to different positions inside our mouths, and also by making sounds in different ways. Some sounds are ‘silent sounds’ like ‘f’, ‘s’, ‘sh’; some other sounds are ‘noisy sounds’ like ‘z’, or ‘r’.
Note that some sounds develop earlier, some sounds develop later.
The general order of speech development is ‘from the outside in’. This means that it is easier for your child to use the lips and jaw than the tongue. Therefore, it is important to note that some sounds do not come out as easily as others.
Keep in mind that not all words that start with the same letter or sound will be equally easy or difficult.
A child who has difficulty saying “k” sounds you will find it easier to say the sound in a word like “comet” where the mouth is more open and there is more room for the tongue in the back of the mouth compared to saying it correctly in “clave” where the mouth is more closed.
Keep in mind that getting from where you are now to the destination sound may require a few intermediate steps.
For example, if your child cannot say “the” and says “years” instead, you may need to learn to progress from ‘g’ to ‘d’ and so ‘th’. Anything that moves it in the right direction is progress.
Now that we’ve gone over the ‘why’, it’s time for the ‘how’:
Here are the top 3 tips for speech therapy:
1. Slow down, emphasize the sound, and do everything you can to show your child the necessary movements of the tongue and lips.
If your child says ‘tote’ instead of “chocolate,” instead of simply telling your child, “No, say chocolate,” at your usual rate of conversation, try slowing down and emphasizing the sound: “ch-ocolate‘. Exaggerate what you do with your mouth. Look in a mirror with her son while she is teaching you so she can see what you are both doing.
If your child can’t say the whole word, at least try to say a small part of the word correctly, such as being able to say the sound on their own. “ch-ch-ch” or even just the partially correct sound, like just being able to blow air or just rounding your lips.
2. Help your child listen for what is and is not.
Help your child avoid mistakes and say sounds correctly by showing them what is not and which is For example, “I don’t have cothereto bear pencils, these are all coIour pencils. What would you like?” Her son is more likely to say “crayon” correctly.
It is also important that you give them very clear feedback. This includes imitating what your child is doing or describing the sound in a language your child can understand. For example, you could say, “If you say ‘-op’ Your friend may not understand you. He is a silent sound ‘jump’.”
3. A game changer tip: teach it out loud, then say it silently, then say it out loud again.
One great speech therapy tip that I found from my experience is to focus on the movement of the mouth. Ask your child to say the word, for example, ‘strawberry’ with you. On the second try, simply say the word without saying it out loud.
Encourage your child to move his mouth in the same way. This allows your child to focus more on the movements of the mouth. Using a mirror can help your child see exactly how he moves his mouth.
Please understand that correcting unclear speech through speech therapy exercises is a process. Being able to do it slowly is better than not being able to do it at all. Speech therapy to learn the necessary lip and tongue. movements it’s more like learning to dance or play the piano than learning a new language.
Just knowledge speech is not the same as being able to move your tongue fast enough say the word. It takes practice and the more you practice the better you get. Therefore, you should try to get your child to say the word more than once. Once is NOT practical.
Remember: your child is where he is now because of how he has learned so far. If her son learns to speak differently, she needs to be taught differently. Seek help from a professional and consult a speech therapist.
Working together with a speech therapist will save you and your child a lot of time and frustration. Most of the time, your child will also enjoy speech therapy sessions!