Transcript
HOW TO HELP - SPEECH SOUNDS Learning to communicate can be a tricky process. It can be broadly divided into 3 areas: 1. Learning to understand what other people say 2. Learning to produce words & put them together to make sentences 3. Learning to pronounce words clearly by making speech sounds If your child has difficulty in the third area then he/she has a delay in developing their speech sound system. Most children follow a similar pattern of development as they learn to speak. It takes at least three years to learn to pronounce the 24 spoken sounds and the 100+ consonant combinations that occur in the English language. The way children develop speech sounds can be broken down into different stages. Before a child is able to produce a given sound, they need to learn to recognise and identify that sound as they hear it. The advice your Speech & Language therapist gives you will depend upon the age and stage of development of your child. General Advice 1. Make sure you provide lots of clear models for speech. This simply means that when your child says a word incorrectly ( e.g. tat for CAT ), you say the word in the correct way back to them. 2. Unless your Speech & Language therapist has given you specific targetted worksheets to do, do not ask your child to copy the word you have just said. This is because copying a word someone else says is different to producing it yourself.
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The most important thing is to listen to the correct way of saying it over & over again. Make sure that your child is actually concentrating on what you have just said. It is a good idea to make eye contact and get down on their eye level where possible. If the Speech and Therapist has talked about specific groups of sounds which are difficult for your child they may provide you with some activities or worksheets for these sounds. For example, some children have difficulty acquiring friction or ‘fricative’ sounds - these are the longer sounds in our system where air escapes between various parts of our mouth e.g. f, s and sh. Younger children may find set activities too demanding. In this case, try playing some games that allow you to use lots of the target sounds. For example, if working on ‘s’ try using a tea set to make a toy’s birthday party. Make some sandwiches, sausages, and some silly soup made of spaghetti, sugar puffs and socks!!! Remember to just keep modelling the words over & over again. Some songs, nursery rhymes, poems or stories are also very good for focusing on specific sounds. For example, try reading Jack and the Beanstalk if your child is struggling to develop ‘f’ (Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum!). Avoid telling your child to “Say..CAT”. This can be very frustrating for your child especially if they are not ready to produce that sequence of sounds. Children often develop sounds in a pattern that means sounds may be correct in some words and incorrect or missing in others. For example, ‘s’ can appear first at the ends of words (mess, house, bus), then at the beginning of words if the ‘s’ is followed by a vowel (sea, saw, sun) and then to the beginning (spoon, star, snake). So if your child can say ‘bus’ but says ‘tun’ instead of ‘sun’, this is simply the normal developmental process. If your child attends playgroup or nursery and you are worried that other people don’t understand them, it can be helpful to provide staff with some background information to help them ‘tune in’ to understand your child’s speech. Try writing a list of family names, pet names/type, favourite toy/book/TV characters, favourite food/drink, holiday destinations etc.
Salford Speech & Language Therapy Dept
January 2009
