By Pam Marshalla
Q: I am an SLP who works with preschoolers, and my own daughter has a slight problem at age 18 months. I am getting frantic about this and need advice. She uses more than 50 words, is beginning to put two-word combinations together, and she has consonant phonemes from each manner group (a few stops, glides, nasals, and fricated sounds). She has all her vowels except those that require lip rounding, and I cannot seem to get her to round…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I am working with a 5 year old boy who is unable to lingua-alveolar consonants except an occasional N in isolation and occasionally in the initial position of syllables. I am able to get the tongue placement for /t/ and /d/ but as soon as he tries to say the sound, he makes the /k/ or /g/. Any suggestions would be most appreciated! The anterior consonants T, D, N, L, S, Z come in because the jaw begins to…
By Pam Marshalla
Several questions have come in recently about how to get rid of hypernasality on a specific phoneme, particularly the hypernasal R and the nasal snort on one or more of the sibilants. I’d like to address these questions together… We are talking about clients who produce nasal emission on one or more specific phonemes in the absence of more generalized hypernasality. These clients sniff, snort, or allow some nasal sound to escape during production of their error phoneme(s). Peterson-Falzone and…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My client lets air come out the side of his mouth when he makes Th. It’s not a big deal, but it is noticeable and distracting. This could be classified as a minor lateral lisp. The client is lacking the firm push of the side of his tongue against his side teeth that would prevent the airstream from staying midline. I would use a straw. Place one end of the straw outside the central incisors and tell him the…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My 19-month-old cannot produce O. She is smart and has no other speech or developmental problems, but it interferes with intelligibility. My guess is that your daughter will learn to round her lips within a few weeks or months all on her own without any help. She is only one year old and has lots of time to gain this simple skill. If you were to come to my office about this, and this was the only problem, I…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I have an elementary age male client that was attaining an adequate R, but then we had scheduling problems and he lost it. I cannot get it anywhere now. Help! When I have a client like this, I start from scratch. I assume they can do nothing that I worked on with them, and I re-visit all we have done before. Slow way down. Do not assume any generalization. Review, review, review what he could already do and solidify…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I have been to one of your workshops and heard you say, “Speech is movement.” Is that something you made up or does it come from something you read? “Speech is Movement” is my therapeutic motto. It is a quote I got from the 20th century’s first greatest motor speech scientist in Stetson, R. (1928). Motor Phonetics: A Study of Speech Movements in Action. USA: North Holland.
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My nearly 3-year-old client makes a substitution for /k/ which comes from the throat. The closest I have found online is to describe it as a uvular stop. Have you heard this substitution before and how would you describe it. Any thoughts on how to treat it? Infants start out by making stops and fricatives all along the vocal track from anterior to posterior — Bi-labial Labial-dental Lingual-labial Lingual-dental Lingual-alveolar Lingual-velar Tracheal Glottal Then they learn to restrict what…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: What is the secret for vocalic R? I have students who can produce prevocalic R very well yet when it comes to Ar, Or, and Ir, and so forth, they flounder. Any tips for this? The key to mastery of vocalic R first is to realize that tongue position for prevocalic R and postvocalic R are exactly the same. The difference is in the transitions movements. Transitions Movements When we produce a prevocalic R at the beginning of a…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My client makes a whistling sound when he says S. Do you have advice? A high-pitched “whistled S” is the result of an airway space in the mouth that simply is too narrow causing whistling instead of true frication. All you have to do is get him in front of a mirror and have him start experimenting with how much air he is letting out. He may need to pull the tip of his tongue back a little, or…
