Articulation Archives - Page 31 of 34 - Marshalla Speech & Language

Category: Articulation

Lateral Lisp, Palatal Expander, and Oral Habits

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I am working with an eight-year-old boy who has a lateral lisp as well as orthodontic problems and oral habits. He has severe lip-licking and nail-biting habits, and he has a narrow palate that will need expansion. I am thinking that he may do better in therapy once the palatal expander is removed. What are your thoughts? One could approach this problem from many angles, but this would be my basic line of thinking: A lateral lisp is a…

Teaching /w/

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I have a three-year-old girl who does not make a /w/ and so far I’ve been unsuccessful at changing that! She can do bilabial sounds /m, b, p/ and can close her lips fine to “kiss” or make fish lips and smack her lips. I’ve been trying to approximate the /w/ by having her combine “oo” and “uh” but she stops the airflow in between so the /w/ is never heard! Are there any airflow tricks I can use…

What to Practice at Home

By Pam Marshalla

Q: When it comes to giving homework in articulation therapy, should the SLP wait until the student masters it in the speech room? I view learning new phonemes as the process of learning new movements. Therefore, I only have kids practice at home what they can do with 100% accuracy with me in the therapy room. I am a very picky and exacting teacher! Rigidity such as this is not critical when the client has a general articulation delay. When…

What is PROMPT?

By Pam Marshalla

Q: Can you explain the PROMPT method you mention in your class on apraxia and dysarthria? PROMPT is short for the system called “Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets” developed by Deborah Hayden. It is a tactile cueing technique for phoneme production. The trainer uses hands-on tactile cues – she touches on and around the client’s mouth – to shape the mouth for speech sound production. On their website, the PROMPT method is described as: “the systematic manipulation of…

Help Teaching Final Consonants

By Pam Marshalla

Q: Can you give me some ideas about getting my clients to use final consonants? Here are a few ideas. These can be used alone or in combinations together. Auditory Bombardment Read a list of words that all have the same phoneme in the final position: cat, hat, rat, light, boat, kite, meat… Do this while the client is playing quietly at a table task such as drawing or clay. The client’s job is to listen. Amplification Amply your productions…

Word Lists

By Pam Marshalla

Q: Where do you get the very specific word lists you use for the articulation training you describe for R and the Lisps? You are talking about organizing word lists by vowels when working on phoneme R or the sibilants. I use a variety of dictionaries, thesauruses, and rhyming dictionaries. I also use the popular book called 40,000 Selected Words: Organized by Letter, Sound, Syllable by Valeda Blockcolsky, Joan M. Frazer, and Douglas H. Frazer. I always keep on hand a…

Writing Oral Motor Goals for Therapy

By Pam Marshalla

Q: What is your opinion about writing goals for oral motor exercises when a client has a functional articulation disorder? My training would suggest that working on oral motor skills is appropriate only when there is a motor speech disorder. When asked how to write OM goals, I say, “Don’t write OM goals!” Oral movement is not your goal. The speech sound production is your goal. Write speech goals. Speech is movement. Whether you are working with clients who have…

Jaw Lateralization and the Lateral Lisp

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I have a kindergarten student who slides her jaw side-to-side during conversational speech, resulting in a lateral lisp. I have used a bite block program but it has not helped. She has good jaw strength. She can hold large bite blocks in her teeth bilaterally and speak without dropping them. But her speech isn’t any better. What should I do? This is not a strength problem. I am sure her oral mechanism is strong enough to support speech. This is…

Teaching Phonemes: Advice to Preschool Teachers

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I am a preschool teacher and am wondering how to teach the “K” sound to one of my students. Let’s broaden your question to: How does one teach a child to say a new phoneme? This is what I would tell a preschool teacher: Show her how to make the sound: Ask her to watch and listen to you say the sound. Pause slightly before you say it. Make the sound stand out by saying it a little louder, by…

The Essence of Therapy With Little Kids

By Pam Marshalla

Q: Our son is three and was non-verbal. Our SLP seems really good at helping him learn to talk. But he is very hard to understand. What can we do? The essence of speech therapy for little children is to learn about words and sounds. We need to focus on both when working with young children. Many of today’s younger therapists put all their focus on building vocabulary, and they spend very little time focused on the actual production of…