Top 3 Proven Speech Therapy Tips When Your Child’s Speech Is Unclear

Are you having trouble understanding what your child is saying?

She says “yion” instead of “lion” or do you make mistakes with other sounds?

Is your child left out at school or on the playground because other children can’t understand him?

It is frustrating for both you and your child when you cannot understand it and have to ask several questions just to clarify. These are the main reasons we frequently explain to our speech therapy clients why their child has unclear speech:

Muscular weakness.

Various muscles are involved in producing speech, and sometimes the inability to move these muscles can make speech unclear. For example, your child may not be able to lift the tip of the tongue to produce the ‘the’ sound.

Control and Coordination.

The problem may not be muscle weakness, but rather your child has trouble coordinating movements. This is similar to people who cannot dance. There is nothing really wrong with their legs, but they dance “with two left feet.” So your child can say ‘the’ in ‘lion’ but unable to say ‘the’ in “caterpillar”. Or I could say ‘lion’ for a minute and ‘yion’ the next, and ‘wion’ the next.

Phonological difficulties.

It’s more about having a cognitive concept of sounds, as opposed to the physical aspect of producing speech. For example, if your child grew up speaking or listening to Mandarin Chinese, you may say ‘court-‘ instead of ‘home’ or ‘cat-‘ instead of ‘catch’.

It is not that I am incapable of producing the ‘-I know’ wave ‘-ch’ sound; it is simply because there are no such ending sounds in Mandarin and therefore it is more difficult for you to understand the concept that there are ending sounds in English.

Why is speech therapy important?

A speech therapist is a professional who is specifically trained to diagnose and treat speech problems in children (and adults). Speech therapy is important because:

1. It makes your life easier

2. Eliminate the vicious cycle: unclear speech causes less interaction and therefore less voice input and worse speech and language.

When your child has unclear speech, this can result in less interaction with other children, resulting in even worse speech and language due to lack of practice. Even adults attend speech therapy classes for this reason alone.

3. It affects the way your child learns to read.

Instead of learning that the letter ‘s’ has the sound in ‘sock’, for example, if it says ‘tock’ instead, you may end up thinking that the letter ‘s’ have a ‘t’ sound.

The 4 guiding principles of speech therapy

Teaching a child with unclear speech may be different from how other children in your family are taught. You may need to repeat more often and emphasize the sounds more. Here are some things that we regularly use in speech therapy when dealing with your child’s unclear speech:

Note that clear speech sounds are reduced to oral motor movements of the tongue or lips or other speech muscles. (It’s not ‘All about that bass’, it’s ‘All about the place’!) The placement of the tongue, that is.

We produce different speech sounds in tongue twisters (“She sells seashells on the seashore”). And in everyday speech because we are able to move the tongue to different positions inside the mouth, and also producing sounds in different ways. Some sounds are ‘quiet murmur sounds’ like ‘f’, ‘s’, ‘sh’; some other sounds are ‘noisy sounds’ like ‘z’ or ‘r’.

Note that some sounds develop earlier, some sounds develop later.

The order of general development of speech is “from outside in”. This means that it is easier for your child to use the lips and jaw than the tongue. Therefore, it is important to note that some sounds are not as easy as others.

Keep in mind that not all words that begin with the same letter or sound will be equally easy or difficult.

A child who has trouble saying “k” Sounds will find it easier to say the sound in a word like “kite” where the mouth is wider and there is more room for the tongue at the back of the mouth compared to saying it correctly in “clef” where the mouth is. more closed.

Note that getting from where you are now to the target sound may require some intermediate steps.

For example, if your child can’t say “he” and says “ge” instead, you may need to learn to progress ‘g’ to ‘d’ and later ‘th’. Anything that moves her in the right direction is progress.

Now that we’ve analyzed the ‘why’, it’s time for the ‘how’:

Here are the top 3 speech therapy tips:

1. Slow down, emphasize the sound, and do your best to show your child the necessary tongue and lip movements.

If your child says ‘total’ Instead of ‘chocolate’, instead of just telling your child ‘No, say chocolate’, at your usual talking speed, try slowing down and emphasizing the sound: ‘ch-chocolate‘. Exaggerate what you do with your mouth. Take a look in a mirror with your child while you are teaching him so he can see what you are both doing.

If your child can’t say the whole word, at least try to get a small part of the word right, for example, only be able to say the sound on his own. “ch-ch-ch” or even just the partially correct sound, like being able to blow the air or just round the lips.

2. Help your child hear what is not and what is.

Help your child avoid mistakes and pronounce sounds correctly by showing them what it is. no and what it is. For example, “I don’t have any coandour pencils, these are all cotheour pencils. What would you like? “Your child is more likely to say ‘colored pencil’ correctly.

It is also important that you give them very clear feedback. This includes imitating what your child is doing or describing the sound in a language your child can understand. For example, you might say, “If you say ‘-op’ your friend may not understand you. It’s a silent sound ‘jump’. “

3. A tip to change the rules of the game: teach it out loud, then say it silently and then say it out loud again.

A great speech therapy tip that I came across from my experience is to focus on the movement of the mouth. Ask your child to say the word, for example, ‘strawberry’ with you. On the second try, just articulate the word without saying it out loud.

Encourage your child to move his mouth in the same way. This allows your child to focus more on mouth movements. Using a mirror can help your child see exactly how their mouth is moving.

Please understand that correcting unclear speech using speech therapy exercises is a process. Being able to do it slowly is better than not being able to do it at all. Speech therapy to learn the necessary lips and tongue. movements it is more like learning to dance or play the piano than learning a new language.

Only knowledge the word is not the same as being able to move your tongue fast enough tell the word. It takes practice and the more you practice, the better you become. Therefore, you should try to get your child to say the word more than once. One time is NOT practical.

Remind: your child is where he is now because of how he has learned so far. If your child learns speech differently, he needs to be taught differently. Seek the help of a professional and consult a speech therapist.

Working together with a speech therapist will save you and your child a lot of time and frustration. Most of the time, your child will also enjoy speech therapy sessions.