Welcome back to part 2 of my articulation series on the Family Chatterbox Blog! You guys, I can’t even tell you how excited I am to be telling you alllllll about articulation. It’s so fascinating. Okay so first things first, how do we determine if a child is having “articulation difficulties” and when are they just learning to talk?
Well I’m glad you asked! SLP’s (Speech Language Pathologists) have a variety of tools at their disposal to use in order to make this determination, and one of those tools is Standardized Assessments. Now there are MANY MANY MANY different standardized assessments, so I’ll just give you the two most common articulation tests I see in Minnesota. These are the Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation (GFTA) and the Arizona Articulation Proficiency Scale (Arizona).
Now, a quick disclaimer about standardized test, I don’t love them. Most likely more blog postings on this down the road about that, but for now let’s leave it at this. I don’t think they reflect an accurate picture of a child in a real life environment the majority of the time. Period. So that being said, let’s move on.
These articulation tests are both picture tests, where you have the child seated at the table and show them a variety of pictures. Each of these tests measures all of the sounds that we have in the English language, and provides the child an opportunity to say each sound in different word positions. For example, there is “cookie”, “vacuum”, and “duck” in the GFTA, which gives the child a chance to say /k/ sound in the beginning, middle, and end of words. The therapist then records the child’s errors, derives a score, and compares that score to that child’s same age-matched peers.
If the child scores in the 50th percentile, they are average compared to their peers at producing speech sounds in single words. Now many of the tests have other subtests where the child can be tested on sounds in conversational speech, and sentences, etc. but the most common articulation tests are given in single words. Each test is a bit different in the sounds that they measure as well. As a general rule of thumb, if I am looking for /r/ as a challenging sound I will give the Arizona because it measures more /r/ productions with different vowels, but for the most part, the GFTA is my articulation test of choice.
After we have determined that there is indeed an articulation difficulty, then what? Stay tuned for next weeks blog post to learn more!
-Kasey-