By Pam Marshalla
Q: I currently have a female client age 2;5 who cannot lateralize or elevate her tongue. Would you have any suggestions for me? When a client has the type of limited tongue movement you describe, I think we have to follow Charlie Van Riper’s most basic advice, which is to get the tongue to move in any and all new directions. He called it “vivifying” tongue movement. To vivify means to enlighten or animate. This means that at first we…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: How do you tell if a client is clenching the jaw when producing a target phoneme? The best way to determine if a client is clenching is to palpate the masseters. Do this on yourself first to learn the feeling. Place your fingertips on your masseters and then clench. Do you feel the bulge? Now do this with your client. If the jaw is clenching you will feel the muscle belly bulge. If it isn’t, then you won’t.
By Pam Marshalla
Q: Our SLPAs see artic kids for 5-7 minute every day. Some of the kids with frontal lisps also have reverse swallow patterns (tongue thrust swallow, infantile suckle-swallow patterns). Should the SLPAs work on this too? Will these kids fix their lisps without it? Yours is the question I hope the 21st century will answer! I personally do not think that SLPs or SLPAs who are not trained in teaching the correct swallow have any business working on it with…
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: In your workshop on the lisps and R, you said that we now have numbers to define jaw stability. Can you share them here? Yes! I would love to! As we all know, the mouth can move in a range that far exceeds that necessary for correct speech articulation, therefore it has to have mechanisms to hold its moving parts in place. This process is called oral stability. Oral stability consists of three parts: jaw stability, lip stability, and…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: Do SLP’s need a background in orofacial myofunctional therapy? I am not a certified orofacial myologist, but I have taken many seminars on the topic. I attend their conventions periodically, and I read and have written for the IAOM Journal. I have found that concepts from orofacial myofunctional therapy have been very useful to me as another way to gain a broad perspective of oral movements. Throughout my career I have combined concepts from orofacial myology, feeding development and therapy, and…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My client keeps lifting the tip of his tongue when I want him to lift the back for K and G. How can I get him to stop doing this? The simplest way is to use an inhibition technique. Hold down the tip with a tongue depressor and tell him to lift the back instead. I also might use some tactile stimulation in the form of gentle brushing to help him understand the difference between the back of the…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I have a client who uses a velar fricative for the sibilants. I was experimenting with some of your self-assessment exercises in your book Frontal Lisp, Lateral Lisp, and I noticed that as I dropped my jaw to produce /s/, the sound eventually became a velar fricative. Do you think jaw grading or stability exercises will help my client with this? Position of the tongue relative to the palate is directly related to jaw position, height, and stability as…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My preschool client has no fricatives or affricates. Do you have advice for getting them started? The fricatives and affricates emerge out of the pre-speech raspberries. I would start there. The raspberries are made both with and without voice and in many places of articulation–– bi-labial, lingua-labial, lingua-velar, and nasal snort. I have my clients makes them big and sloppy at first. Then I teach them to make the soft and gentle. When I move on to the fricated…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: Can you give me a short course on stimulating the tongue to move? This is about as short and sweet as it could possibly be–– The first thing to understand about the oral mechanism is that the muscles of the facial structures are contiguous and integral to the skin. This is different from the entire rest of the body where skin and muscles form completely separate structures. This means that tactile stimulation is the most powerful way to “wake…
