Speech and Articulation

It’s never too late to change the way you speak. For adults, maturity and motivation often counteract long established speech muscle patterns. Speech sounds and accents may be transformed through individualized, confidential sessions at Granite Bay Speech.

Children usually develop sounds in a normal progression. For information on normal progression, please consult our age checklists to learn more about age-appropriate skills. If you feel your child has not reached the appropriate speech and language milestones for their age, we would love to consult with you. We can provide a personalized program for your family.

Speech intelligibly is how much of a person’s speech a listener can understand. For instance, if you can only understand half of what a child is saying then their speech intelligibility rating would be 50%. While speech intelligibility is expected to improve with a child’s age, it is also used as a measure of determining speech delays and speech disorders. If you are concerned with your child’s language or speech development, getting professional screening or evaluation can help to determine if your child needs treatment. Granite Bay Speech can help you determine if therapy is necessary.

Individuals may mishear sounds due to permanent or fluctuating hearing loss. Frequent ear infections may cause inconsistent sound perception. Other individuals may be tongue-tied, have dental or jaw problems, structural problems, cleft palate, motor speech disorders, apraxia, or neurological injury or diseases. Sometimes the origin of speech difficulties is unknown.

Functional communication refers to the most basic of communication skills.  This type of communication gets one’s basic wants and needs known, such as “I want that”, “I am hurt”, or “I need to use the bathroom”.  These are not complex thoughts and they are often the first types of messages that children begin to communicate.

For most children, functional communication begins to emerge in the first year of life with gestures and is expanded on in the following years with words and later, simple sentences.  However, for children with speech and language delays, this may happen much later and after seeking guidance from a Speech Language Pathologist.

Articulation errors are described as a substitution, omission, addition, and distortion. When this happens, speech may sound garbled or slurred. Children who misarticulate sounds may develop spelling and reading issues as they struggle to match the printed letter with their mispronounced speech sound. Individuals and adults at school, work and in social situations may converse less with a person who is difficult to understand.

Phonological processing errors occur when the rules for groups or sound classes are in error. An individual may produce frontal tongue tip sounds such as “t” and “d” for all their back tongue sounds “g” and “k” (det for get, tate for take). They may produce all their blowing sounds “sh,” “ch,” “s,” “z,” as if they were stopping sounds “t”, “d” (ton for sun, doe for so). When individuals produce entire classes of sounds in error, their speech is often extremely difficult to understand, and both the speaker and listener may become very frustrated. An assessment may be needed to determine whether a child should enroll in therapy.

Tongue thrust and frontal lisp are commonly confused, as both result in a ‘th’ when attempting to produce the ‘s’ and ‘z’ phonemes. The frontal lisp is classified as an articulatory error, as the tongue is simply being placed incorrectly between the upper and lower front teeth during sound production. When an individual has a tongue thrust, the tongue’s position sits forward in the mouth at all times, even when swallowing and at rest. All sounds can be affected by this forward-sitting position, especially the ‘s’ and ‘z’ phoneme.

Tongue thrust is the most common Orofacial Myofunctional Disorder (OMD). Orofacial Myofunctional Disorders are anatomical and physiological differences of oral and facial structures (lips, teeth, tongue, jaw, cheeks, and palate) that are noticeably different; interfere with normal dentofacial, speech, physical or psychosocial development; or that are of cosmetic concern. These include lip and tongue rest, swallow, and speech posture differences. (Hale, Kellum, & Gross 1991). Granite Bay Speech provides a free phone consultation to answer your questions about any speech-related disorder.