By Pam Marshalla
Q: What about kids who add a schwa to the end or middle of words? Do you have any ideas for that? I see the addition of a schwa as the child’s way of making a simpler speech motor pattern. According to researchers, the CV is the simplest motor pattern and kids change a CVC to a CV-CV to make it easier. All kids do this — e.g., “mom” changes to “mama” and “dad” changes to “dada”. They also do this with the diminutive —…
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: I am an SLP who works with preschoolers, and my own daughter has a slight problem at age 18 months. I am getting frantic about this and need advice. She uses more than 50 words, is beginning to put two-word combinations together, and she has consonant phonemes from each manner group (a few stops, glides, nasals, and fricated sounds). She has all her vowels except those that require lip rounding, and I cannot seem to get her to round…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I am working with a 5 year old boy who is unable to lingua-alveolar consonants except an occasional N in isolation and occasionally in the initial position of syllables. I am able to get the tongue placement for /t/ and /d/ but as soon as he tries to say the sound, he makes the /k/ or /g/. Any suggestions would be most appreciated! The anterior consonants T, D, N, L, S, Z come in because the jaw begins to…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My son is 2.5 years old. He can say 6 words: Mom (ma), ball, up (uh), gone, please (pease), and truck. I am feeling overwhelmed with how to incorporate the 3 tracks of your “Vowel Tracks” material. Can I start with one track? He gets really frustrated with wanting stuff. I am getting worried he won’t talk. The purpose of Vowel Tracks is to show how to focus on vowels as new words are being added to a child’s…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: What articulation developmental norms do you use? I don’t use any specific developmental norms because of the following: Lieberman (1980) found that a rudimentary vowel quadrilateral is set in infant vocal productions by 5 months of age. According to a recent chapter by Vihman (2004), research demonstrates that average children acquire basically all the consonant phonemes by 3 years of age. All studies that have been done since Templin in 1957 have demonstrated that all the consonants reach adult…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I have a 3-year-old male client with apraxia. We are working on initial F. After two unsuccessful sessions where he completely shut down and did not want to speak, I took the pressure off, bombarded him with the sound, and rewarded him for placement. He ended up with a few good productions of the sound by the end of the session. The problem is that he came back to therapy today overgeneralizing the F. I was wondering if this…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My preschool client says words, but they only occur at the end of long jargoned gibberish. How do I get rid of that unintelligible part? I would not take the jargon away because jargon is a natural part of speech development. Van Riper called it pretend speech. I call the type you described Word Jargon. It is jargon embedded with real words. Kids without speech-language impairment do this all the time, as they are moving toward 2-3 word phrases….
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I am an SLP with a two-year-old son who has developed a lateral lisp on Sh and Ch. I really don’t want these lateral sounds to get worse and I am tired of hearing that I am over-reacting. Help! Oh you poor thing! Being an SLP and having a child of your own with an artic problem is one of the worst situations to be in! You are NOT over-reacting because you know that some of these so-called minor…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I am working with a two-year-old who uses a guttural back sound for initial T in words. He can say initial D correctly. Do I need to be worried about this T? Yes and no. When I work with kids under three years of age, I do not concern myself with how they produce individual phonemes within individual words. So I don’t find it important that the child can say “two” with a correct T, for example. But I…
