By Pam Marshalla
Q: My 4-year-old client has no strident sounds and I was thinking about starting with S. Is this right? And how should I teach it? Whether or not to start with S as your first strident sound depends entirely on the client. Here is advice to get you going: Expand Your Horizons Don’t just look at the strident sounds (S, Z, Sh, Zh, CH, and J). Look at all 11 fricatives and affricates together—Th, Th, F, V, S, Z, Sh,…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My client substitutes fp/f in the initial position, so he says “fpour” for “four”. Why does he put that P in there and how can I get him to stop it? I have seen this error a thousand times as it is a very common one in young children. Here’s how I see it: The client can say F, but he cannot transition from the voiceless F to the voiced vowel without stopping his airflow. In other words, he…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My 7-year-old male client has a lateral lisp. I have been trying to use T and Ts, but he just can’t get it. He still lateralizes his /s/ and /z/. He can produce /str/ appropriately but I just can’t get S alone. I wish I could generalize it to /s/ and /z/. Let’s ignore the cluster “Str” for the moment. I think it is too complex to work with and, as you have said, he cannot generalize. Let’s assume…
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: I am targeting /f/ in the initial position. My client is able to produce /f/ at the word level; however, he adds a /v/ after the /f/ for every word; i.e., /fvood/ for /food/. I exhausted all techniques in my bag of tricks! I am currently having him whisper words and trying to add voicing back to the word; however, that /v/ keeps popping back up. Do you have any other ideas or advice on how to target this?…
By Pam Marshalla
Sooooooooo many questions about teaching S come in that I want to take this opportunity to write out the simplest most direct method that therapists have been using since early in the 20th century. This method is reported in just about every articulation therapy textbook ever written. The oldest reference I have seen for it is Scripture (1912). Scripture’s book is one that Van Riper recommended. There are dozens of ways to do this, but this is the basic procedure––…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My client and I speak both Spanish and English. He devoices D to make T. I don’t know how to help him. Here are the things I usually do–– Teach him about “Voice-on” and “Voice-off” in a different context. I usually start with “Ah” and “H”. Have him hold his neck at the larynx to feel the vibration of voice on the vowel and the absence of voice on H. Repeat this with the fricative cognates: S and Z,…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My client is 4;0 and has a combined frontal and lateral lisp. I have not taken any of your classes or read any of your books. Any suggestions as to how to proceed with treatment? I have written volumes on this topic and it is somewhat difficult to describe in a quick QA. But I will do my best. The short and sweet answer to this question as I see it is as follows (and if you have not…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My client is 4;0 with a frontal lisp with a very small mandible (underbite) and chronic upper respiratory problems––congestion, nasal drip, mouth breathing, snoring, etc. He cannot breath through his nose. Do you think he is capable of learning to keep his tongue in for the sibilants given his underbite? Yours is a very common question for which we have no clear answers. In all likelihood both the under-bite and the upper respiratory problems are contributing to his speech…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I have discovered that a mirror helps my young clients understand the idea of breath support for speech. Kids notice that their breath makes a fog on a mirror. I teach them to make longer and longer exhalations to make more and more fog and then they draw smiley faces in the fog on the mirror. Fun! Can you comment? My reading of historic artic books has revealed to me that we all end up developing the same methods…
