By Pam Marshalla
Q: I work in the Early Intervention setting and increasingly encounter late talking children (frequently boys) who prefer a frontal tongue posture. What’s the correction? In my experience, this problem does not need to be fixed in a two-year-old boy who is delayed in SL. First, tongue protrusion is normal in two-year-olds. Second, the child is late in talking and therefore should be using the pattern of a one-year-old. The only thing I would do over the next year is…
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: 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: 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: 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…
