Hi everyone!
Kasey here, with another blog series about typical development of articulation. For those of you who have had the chance to work with me I absolutely love speech sounds and figuring out the best way to help our little ones mouth match all the craziness that’s going on inside their little brains. I had the opportunity to meet with a family friend a few weeks ago and it reignited my passion for helping parents and educators understand what typical speech sound development looks like and how we can plant the seeds to set our kids on the right path from the get-go. To start off, let’s talk about a few different concepts that we need to understand about our children.
Number one: Kids systematically make speech sounds simpler as they are learning to talk in order to be understood. This is a normal part of development and we expect children to do this. They don’t pop out of the womb sounding like an adult, but rather they have more of what some people refer to as ”baby talk”. This is not done haphazardly, it is typically done in a very systematic and organized way, making more challenging and later developing sounds into easier sounds.
Number two: Kids mature in their mouth movements as they grow and develop. Infants and toddlers start off with very basic movements of their tongue, lips and jaw that typically all work together for reflexive purposes like nursing and crying. As kids get older, they figure out more refined movements, such as how to move their tongue without moving their jaw as well as how to move their lips without moving their jaw, etc. We call this process disassociation. So as your toddler begins to produce more complex speech sounds, you may notice their jaw looks a little out of place as it wiggles side to side or jets forward and backward. We want this to decrease fairly rapidly.
Number three: There are typical ways that we expect kids to produce sounds and atypical ways. A quick screener or chat with a speech and language pathologist who specializes in articulation, would be able to tell you almost immediately if your child is on the right track or if they have some atypical speech sound development patterns. Some of these processes are very easy to catch and the research would support the fact that kids are not going to grow out of these processes on their own, and the earlier we can get intervention the better. Some of these include moving sounds to the back of the mouth (like turning everything into K or G), deleting sounds at the beginning of words, or sticking out the tongue in ways that it should not be out.
These are just a few of the things that I want us to keep in mind as we think about typical speech sound development and have a foundation of understanding before we go into these next two blogs. Check back in for our next blog about how to help some of these common challenges.
-Kasey-