Well hello again! We hope you are enjoying your fall season and have jumped back into a regular schedule and routine during the school year! I have had many families asking me about speech sound substitutions lately, and so I thought it might be a helpful blog post for some of you!
As we work with some little ones on developing a more intelligible (remember that word? It means “understood”) speech pattern, we may teach different substitutions or sounds that are not “adult like” but are appropriate for the child’s age. For example, we know from all of our research that the /r/ sound is a later developing sound, and thus if we have a child who is 2 years old, it won’t be appropriate to work on the /r/ sound in therapy. In this case, we would work on developing an age appropriate substitution for /r/ such as /w/ or “oh”. So if we have little Johnny who can’t say the word “prize”, we would help him to approximate this word to sound something like “pwize” which the average nice lady at the grocery store check out counter would still likely understand when she hears it. This would be a lot closer than Johnny saying “Kwize” or “pies” if he makes an unusual substitution of /k/ for /p/, or if he omitted the /r/ sound all together. By teaching Johnny how to mark that the sound is supposed to be there in the word, and giving his listeners a familiar substitution for his age, we help him to be understood by those around him. Make sense?
Some other common substitutions that could be taught in therapy include the following:
Any other speech sound substitutions that you hear your child making? Need an example of how to help your child? Give us a call! We’d love to chat J
-Kasey-