Speech Production

Types of Speech Production disorders
When your child receives an evaluation by one of our SLPs, we will be not only listening for the presence of a speech disorder but for what type of speech production disorder it is.  There are three main types we will listen for: an articulation disorder, a phonological disorder, and childhood apraxia of speech.

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Articulation Disorder
Articulation disorders are characterized by errored production of one or a few speech sounds.  For example, if your 9-year-old child struggles with producing /r/ but has mastered all other speech sounds, they may need articulation therapy to learn the correct production of the sound.

Phonological Disorder
Phonological disorders refer to the presence of phonological processes in a child’s speech.  Phonological processes are predictable patterns of errors that children use to simplify adult speech that persists beyond when they are age-appropriate.  For example, if your 5-year-old child consistently leaves the final consonant sound off of words regardless of what that final consonant sound is, they may need therapy to target the phonological process of final consonant deletion.  There are over 20 different phonological processes, or error patterns, that may occur.  

 

Three examples include:
 

1. Final consonant deletion: producing words without the last consonant.  This may sound like ‘pig’ as ‘pih’, ‘book’ as ‘buh’ and ‘car’ as ‘cah’.  
    

2. Stopping: substituting shorter sounds, such as /d/ and /b/, for longer ones, such as /s/ and /f/.  This may sound like ‘fan’ as ‘pan’ or ‘house’ as ‘haut’.  
    

3. Gliding: substituting a liquid sound (/l/ or /r/) with a glide sound (/w/ or /y/).  This may sound like ‘red’ as ‘wed’ or ‘cry’ as ‘cwy’. 

Childhood Apraxia of Speech
Unlike articulation and phonological disorders that involve mislearning of sounds and sound patterns, Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) is motor-based in etiology.  This means that the child has difficulty coordinating the muscle movements needed to produce speech sounds.  Many muscles need to move the tongue, lips, and jaw in very specific ways to produce precise speech sounds. CAS does not indicate that these speech muscles are weak, but rather that the brain has difficulty creating a motor plan and executing muscle movements to produce speech sounds accurately.  

 

Some indications of CAS include:

• Limited spoken words

• Limited consonant and vowel sound inventory 

• Inconsistent errors (producing a word incorrectly but in different ways each time the word is attempted)

Voicing errors (turning their voice on at the wrong spots in a word)
Vowel distortion errors (trying to produce a vowel and producing a different vowel instead)
Groping movements (mouth movements while trying to attain correct positioning)

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Therapy Techniques
Therapy techniques selected to treat your child depend on the nature of their speech sound disorder.  

 

Our SLPs have advanced professional training in a wide range of techniques, including:
 

Talk Tools®
The Talk Tools program is a highly respected and sought-after approach to improving speech production using bubbles, whistles, straws, and other oral motor tasks. These well-organized tools and tasks improve strength and coordination of the speech articulators. They also build new oral motor plans which increase speech production. For more information on TALK

 

TOOLS, please visit www.talktools.com.
PROMPT© Therapy
PROMPT, an acronym for Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets is a play-based therapy in which the SLP very strategically chooses target sounds for the child to focus on. Tactile prompts are used to help the children achieve proper oral motor postures to produce the targets. Social, cognitive, and linguistic aspects are all considered when choosing the targets. For more information on PROMPT therapy, please visit their website at www.promptinstitute.com

 

Written by Stacy Lecznar, MA, CCC-SLP A Gigi’s Kids Speech and Language Pathologist