Articulation speech therapy is often recommended to children who exhibit some speech sound errors, to ensure they can be understood by listeners and participate in everyday interactions.
Articulation speech therapy Adelaide offers numerous treatment approaches. These include vertical (focusing on mastery of one or two sounds until they become automatic) and cycles approaches.
What is Articulation Therapy?
Articulation refers to the ability to clearly pronounce individual speech sounds that compose words and sentences, including lips, teeth, tongue and other mouth and airway parts. Problems with articulation may affect how your child interacts with family and friends as well as learning and literacy skills such as reading. Difficulties with articulation may either be developmental in origin or acquired due to injury or illness.
An SLP will conduct a comprehensive evaluation to pinpoint which speech sounds are presenting difficulties for your child and develop a personalised treatment plan. Articulation therapy may benefit children both with developmental and acquired articulation disorders.
At the outset of articulation therapy, SLPs typically conduct an assessment to check stimulability of targeted speech sounds. If successful, more advanced steps may be taken; otherwise they begin at more basic levels such as syllable production before moving up through words, phrases and narrative/conversational levels.
Your child should begin articulation therapy between the ages of 2 and 4, when their speech and language development is at its most active. Children should be able to sit still for long periods, tolerate direct cueing and focus for at least 30 minutes at a time working on their speech sounds.
How Does Articulation Therapy Work?
Articulation therapy for adults and children generally entails one-on-one sessions with a speech language pathologist (SLP) to enhance pronunciation. While the length of therapy sessions varies depending on each person’s articulation disorder severity, most see significant progress over a short period.
Articulation speech therapy Adelaide will employ various approaches to target specific sounds a person struggles with. These may include drills such as repetition of target sound(s) in isolation, with vowels, words, and sentences; contrastive therapy; minimal pairs (two words that differ by only one sound/feature, such as back and rack); contrastive therapy or minimal pairs.
Another key element of articulation therapy is incorporating target sounds into other words to foster generalisation, often through storytelling and conversation activities with the therapist. Finally, targeting these sounds/syllables in natural contexts to promote generalisation during unstructured speech production can improve generalisation over time.
Your child needs help early if their speech clarity is hindering daily activities and impacting daily living, so schedule a free articulation assessment with Great Speech now!
What Are the Goals of Articulation Therapy?
Articulation therapy aims to increase speech intelligibility for children with speech impediments, so that they may be understood by family, friends and classmates; participate in social activities and develop literacy skills; as well as participate in additional social activities and learn new vocabulary skills.
Developmental articulation disorders involve improving how children produce certain sounds – typically consonants – while acquired disorders require improving the ability to pronounce specific sounds that have become difficult due to injury or illness.
An assessment will involve listening to and questioning samples of your child’s speech production, along with asking specific questions to identify areas of difficulty and create an individualised treatment plan to address those areas.
A standard approach is to begin practicing the targeted sound at an individual or syllable level, moving quickly onward to word, sentence and narrative/conversation levels. This enables children to gain experience using the targeted sound in multiple contexts while helping them generalise the new production in unstructured conversational and functional environments.
Children aged two or older should begin articulation speech therapy Adelaide as this allows them to follow directions, pay attention and imitate sounds pronounced by therapists without distracting from task at hand for at least 10 minutes in an ideal therapeutic setting with few distractions.