Articulation Archives - Marshalla Speech & Language

Category: Articulation

Diphthongs and Glides in Core Vocabulary Words

By Pam Marshalla

This slide is from my class on improving intelligibility in apraxia, dysarthria, and low cognitive skills. Research has demonstrated that diphthongs and glides are learned very early and that children with phonological impairment rarely have trouble with them. However, it has been my experience that most clients with apraxia, dysarthria, and low cognitive skills do have trouble with them. Typically these children reduce these early sequences down to single vowels, and they often use the schwa instead of the correct vowel. This means that they are…

Getting Rid of Hypernasality

By Pam Marshalla

Q: My client produces some vowels with nasality. Do you know how to get rid of this problem? Old-fashioned articulation texts (pre-phonology) used to contain large sections, even whole chapters, on how to do this. Let me give you one method to get you started. This one is central to all the rest because it uses a simple biofeedback procedure. Getting rid of nasalization is mostly a matter of ear training. The following represents the way that therapists like Alexander…

Tongue-Protrusion in Toddlers

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I work in the Early Intervention setting and increasingly encounter late talking children (frequently boys) who prefer a frontal tongue posture. What’s the correction? In my experience, this problem does not need to be fixed in a two-year-old boy who is delayed in SL. First, tongue protrusion is normal in two-year-olds. Second, the child is late in talking and therefore should be using the pattern of a one-year-old. The only thing I would do over the next year is…

Adding Final Schwa

By Pam Marshalla

Q: What about kids who add a schwa to the end or middle of words? Do you have any ideas for that? I see the addition of a schwa as the child’s way of making a simpler speech motor pattern. According to researchers, the CV is the simplest motor pattern and kids change a CVC to a CV-CV to make it easier. All kids do this — e.g., “mom” changes to “mama” and “dad” changes to “dada”. They also do this with the diminutive —…

Which First: Consonantal or Vocalic R?

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I have read “Successful R Therapy” and am wondering, do you work on Consonantal R or Vocalic R first, and why? I tend to work on Vocalic R with a retroflex R first because I like to teach the contrast between Ah (Jaw low, mouth open, tongue low) with R (jaw high, mouth almost closed, tongue curled up and back). I also find that starting with a big Ah and teaching the client to prolong it helps him hear…

Fixing an Inhaled “S”

By Pam Marshalla

Q: My client breathes in (inhales) on S. How do I fix this? Teach him to exhale and inhale on demand using a straw or other blow toy. Then teach him to exhale and inhale on S. Teach him to hear and appreciate the difference between an inhaled S and an exhaled S. Teach him which one is correct. Practice the exhaled S. Work on syllables, words, and so forth. Also, see my previous post on this topic.

Creating Oral-Nasal Resonance Balance

By Pam Marshalla

Q: My client sounds hypernasal on certain phonemes. How do I work on this? This question is a regular one that comes into my office. It used to be that textbooks on articulation from Van Riper’s era dealt with this topic quite succinctly, but now with our over-focus on phonology and out downplay on all things phonetic, we seem to be forgetting these basic old-time procedures. I will have a chapter of methods on this in my next book, The Marshalla…

History of the “Long T” Method

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I have seen the Long T Method for teaching S on this blog and in your book “Frontal Lisp, Lateral Lisp” (Marshalla, 2007) as well as in the “Straight Up Speech” program by Jane Folk (Folk, 1992). I was wondering if you had to get permission from Jane for this, or if this method is in public domain? I made up that method just as I suspect Jane did. But it turns out that it is a very old…

Early “T” Therapy

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I am seeing a child who substitutes K for T. He can click his tongue, can touch the alveolar ridge adequately with his tongue, and he understands the tongue placement for T. But he is not able to raise his tongue tip to the alveolar ridge during his attempt to articulate T. He has good phonemic discrimination, too. The lingua-alveolar consonants emerge when the jaw begins to move up-and-down, not when the tongue moves. So begin by teaching the…

Eliminating Lateral Escape of Air

By Pam Marshalla

Q: My 12-year-old client is bright but has a lateral lisp. He has a gap between his side teeth. How can I tell if the dental gap is causing the lateral lisp, and how should I precede? I stuck cotton between the side teeth but it didn’t help. The dental problem may have contributed to the lisp, OR the lisp may have contributed to the dental problem. This is a chicken-and-egg situation that usually has no clear answer. But it doesn’t…