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: 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…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My client makes a whistling sound when he says S. Do you have advice? A high-pitched “whistled S” is the result of an airway space in the mouth that simply is too narrow causing whistling instead of true frication. All you have to do is get him in front of a mirror and have him start experimenting with how much air he is letting out. He may need to pull the tip of his tongue back a little, or…
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.
