By Pam Marshalla
Q: I’m an undergrad student in my senior year, so my question is for a group project for which I have the history/origins of oral motor exercises. I read your article for the Oral Motor Institute where you reviewed a number of texts. My question is “Is there any name — or names — that are associated with the beginnings of using OMEs? And, are there names associated with bringing it into more mainstream practice? This is all brand new…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 am serving a student with moderate acquired dysarthria impacting speech intelligibility due to impaired respiration, phonation, coordination, speech rate and articulatory precision. She is six-years old and her accident was 2 years ago. She can follow directions well and is aware that she sounds different than her peers. The most obvious speech quality is the slow rate, pausing, and unnatural phrasing. Her peers tend to ignore her when she is speaking because these qualities make her sound so…
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…
