Articulation Pt 8 (The last one!!)

YOU MADE IT! Congratulations on making it to the end of our articulation series! Who would have thought that I could write 8 (LONG) posts about articulation? Well don’t ask my husband because he gets to hear me talk about it all the time so I bet he is proud of me for limiting this topic to seven blog posts 😉 In this final post, we are going to talk about one of the most powerful tools we have in articulation therapy, which is called “Segmentation”.

Segmentation is a fancy way to say, we add a pause into the way we say the word. Segmentation allows therapists to break apart tricky words for children as they learn how to incorporate their new sounds into words to be able to communicate more effectively. Segmentation is so powerful because it helps children to take words that are large, complex, and have hard sounds in it, and break it down to a level that they can achieve.

If I could give parents one “nugget” of how to help your children to communicate more effectively, it would be the nugget of segmentation. When in doubt, BREAK IT UP! This can be helpful when you are working on specific speech sounds, longer words, or even phrases/sentences. Here are a few examples…

1. You are asking your child to request “snack” but it sounds like “ack”. Try breaking the “s-blend” (see previous blog post for information about “blends”) apart with the “s” separate from the rest of the word. You could encourage him to say “s” and then “nack”.
2. You are asking your child to produce a longer word such “accident” when he is potty training, but it sounds like “ahtid” when she tries to say it. Try breaking the word part into syllables that will be manageable for her such as “ack, si, dint” for “accident”!
3. You are asking your child to use more than a single word to request another piece of the puzzle you are doing together, but each time he just says “ah!”. Try breaking it up into a three word chunk that he can use over and over again for many requests such as “I”, “Want”, “more”.

Segmentation is just the beauty of breaking things apart so that your child can be more successful in whatever it is that they are trying to communicate. If it still appears too hard, break it apart more! You might even have to break it down to the individual sound level!

Thank you all again so much for hanging in there with me over these past few weeks. It has been a joy breaking apart (segmenting! Hehe) what it is that we do in articulation therapy, and how you can start to help your own child to be successful. Tune in the next couple of days to hear from our other therapist Amber Petereck!

-Kasey-