By Pam Marshalla
A professor wrote me several years ago. She said she taught articulation and phonology, she had tenure, she did research in phonology, she supervised students, and she had published many articles. She said that she could not “see” the oral-motor problems I was talking about in my writing. She wanted to know what I had to say about that. I wrote back and said that she could not “see” the OM problems I was talking about because she could not…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I am working with a two-year-old who uses a guttural back sound for initial T in words. He can say initial D correctly. Do I need to be worried about this T? Yes and no. When I work with kids under three years of age, I do not concern myself with how they produce individual phonemes within individual words. So I don’t find it important that the child can say “two” with a correct T, for example. But I…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I have been told not to attend your seminars because you teach methods that have not been tested. I am new to the profession and am confused. Why do you feel it is appropriate to use and to teach methods that have never been tested? The simplest way I can answer this question (answered before here) is to quote another writing duo: “Clinicians’ imaginations conjure up exercises, techniques, procedures, and approaches, which are first tried on a few patients,…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My 7-year-old male client has a lateral lisp. I have been trying to use T and Ts, but he just can’t get it. He still lateralizes his /s/ and /z/. He can produce /str/ appropriately but I just can’t get S alone. I wish I could generalize it to /s/ and /z/. Let’s ignore the cluster “Str” for the moment. I think it is too complex to work with and, as you have said, he cannot generalize. Let’s assume…
