By Pam Marshalla
Q: My 5-year-old has been in speech therapy since he was 2. After many years of therapy, he pronounces a word right during speech and at home speech activities and he uses them in a sentence, however he’s not carrying over with conversational speech. His SLP tells me to correct him when he says a word wrong, but I’m correcting nearly every word he says which makes him get frustrated and not even want to talk to me. I don’t…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My client misarticulates all the lingua-alveolar consonants–– T, D, N, L, S, Z. Can you give me some advice for how to fix them? Designing methods to “fix” a phoneme all depends upon what is wrong with it. Therefore in order to recommend methods to address these lingua-alveolars, one would need to know–– Are they completely absent from the client’s repertoire? Are they backed? Are they lateralized? Are they interdentalized? Are they nasalized? Is there a lack of plosiveness…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I am very frustrated working in the public school. I am forced to see very low functioning children 2-4 times per week, and even with this much therapy they are not progressing in vocabulary, phonemes, nothing. Am I doing something wrong? Let me be very blunt here. Warning! Those of you who don’t know me need to be warned that I do not speak with political correctness. I find it to be an imposition on our freedom of speech…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: How do you transcribe a frontal lisp? There are many ways to designate a frontal lisp– Some therapists do like to write it as Th/S (using IPA symbols, of course.) Some place a right-facing arrow under the phoneme, to indicate that the tongue is protruding forward. Some draw a circle between a downward-facing caret and an upward-facing caret, indicating the tongue is between the upper and lower teeth. Some simply write D for distorted, but I think that is…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I am so happy to have found your website and blog. I shared the post you made about not stressing out over kids putting extra schwas at the ends of syllables (epenthesis) with all my coworkers at our speech clinic and they loved that advice. I can’t tell you how many goals have been written in this clinic to avoid that process and I feel relieved that I can spend less time worrying about it and more time worrying…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I am aware that a lateral lisp is not considered a developmental error and that it probably will not be outgrown. But I have had parents decline therapy for their six-year-olds saying that they don’t hear it, or telling me that the child does it only when his is excited. Do you have any advice for educating parents about this type of speech error and helping convey the importance of therapy? Most SLPs are not trained in counseling parents…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: Do you think that physical maturation alone can be all that a particular client may need to help his speech improve? Yes, clearly some children outgrow their speech problems. But the only way to know this is to let time pass without therapy. I sometimes recommend that a child go 6-12 months with no therapy to see what happens. I make sure the parents know that I am doing this and why. Often the parents and I alone, or…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: How often do you see your clients? I always set once per week as my “must have” level. That is unless they are only on consult, follow-up, or the later stages of carryover. Over 35 years, I have found that once per week is sufficient for most kids, both the easy kids and the low functioning ones. Easy kids can do perfectly well with once per week, and low functioning clients do not move fast enough to warrant more…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My school district has been suggesting that we work on stopping before s-clusters, and I thought that would be a mistake leading to lots of frustration for both the SLPs and the students. Do you have any comments? I think that whenever we set policy –– “my district has been suggesting that we work on stopping before s-clusters” –– we are forgetting the individual child. There is no hierarchy or policy that should “work.” What “works” is what works…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I serve a female client with Down syndrome in school. She is bright and has done quite well in articulation therapy, but she cannot produce CH due to a severe underbite. This is her last articulation error. Her inability to say the sound is not due to poor oral control or cognitive issues. She simply cannot make this phoneme correctly because of the occlusal problem, but she is not going to receive orthodontia or oral surgery. The parents have…
