Speech Sound Development

My friends with young children often ask me to listen to their kids’ speech: “Anna doesn’t say /r/”, “Matthew says “top” instead of “stop”. Is it time to see a speech therapist?”   
Today, let’s talk about speech and sound development.
 As very young children learn to speak, they simplify the adult speech. They do this because their young brains, lips, and tongues are not mature enough to process and produce adult-sounding speech. They just cannot put correct sounds in correct places in words and sentences yet.   Most of the times the mistakes in the young children’s’ speech are not random and follow the certain predictable patterns, which are called Phonological Processes. All kids use phonological processes as they begin to speak.  When your toddler says “tup” instead of “cup”, she is using a phonological process of fronting, when a child says “cap” instead of “clap”, he is using cluster reduction, and when you hear “too” instead of “shoe”, you hear stopping.
As children mature, their mastery of language increases, phonological processes gradually disappear, and the young child’s speech becomes clearer and more adult-like.  Many of the phonological processes disappear by the age of three, and all of them are expected to resolve by the age of 5.
A typically developing 4-year-old is fully intelligible, but still makes some speech sound errors.
 
Here is a guide to speech intelligibility (how clear a child’s speech is to others):

• By the 2nd birthday, parents should understand at least 50% of what their toddler is saying.
• By the age of 3, 90-100% of what a child is saying should be completely intelligible to the parents, and 75% - to strangers.
• By the age of 4, strangers should understand most of what the child is saying (90-100%)

 
Here are some (but not all) examples of phonological processes and ages by which they are expected to be eliminated:

Disappearing by the age of 3:
Unstressed syllable deletion is omitting a weak syllable (banana = nana)
Final consonant deletion is omitting a consonant at the end of a word (Cat=ca)
Fronting is substituting a front sound for a back sound (Can = tan)
Reduplication is repeating phonemes or syllables (Water = wawa)
 
Disappearing after the age of 3:
Cluster reduction is omitting one or more consonants in a sequence of consonants (Clean = keen) 
Gliding is substituting /w/ or /j/ for another consonant (Run=wun, Lego=yego)
Stopping is substituting a stop consonant for a fricative, liquid, nasal, or glide (Zoo = doo, chair = tair, shoe = too)
 
For a complete list of the phonological processes, their descriptions, and ages by which they should disappear go to
http://www.speech-language-therapy.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=31:table3&catid=11:admin&Itemid=117
 
Here is a quick look at sounds and ages at which 85% of the kids master them. Note that many children may and will learn to produce these sounds correctly earlier. (This information is adapted from Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation, 2-nd edition)
2 years old:
Beginning of the words: b, d, h, m, n, p,   
Middle: b, m, n   
End: m, p
 
3 years old:
Beginning of the words: f, g, k, t, w
Middle: f, g, k, ng, p, t,   
End: b, d, g, k, n, t
 
4 years old:
Beginning of the words: kw    
Middle: d   
End: f
 
5 years old:
Beginning of the words: ch, dz, ts, sh, j, bl
Middle: ch, dz, ts, sh, j, bl
End: l, ng, ch, s, sh, dz, r, v, z
 
6 years old:
Beginning of the words: r, v, most consonant clusters such as br (break), fl (fly) and others  
Middle: r, v   
End:
 
7 years old:
Beginning of the words: th   
Middle: th  
End: th
 
Talk to a speech-language pathologist if your toddler

• Cannot pronounce vowel sounds (a, o, u, i, y) by the age of three
• Omits many consonant sounds in the beginning of words (oo instead of shoe) by the age of three
• Produces back sounds k,g, h in place of other sounds (kiger instead of tiger) in any age
• Continues to omit final consonants past the age of three.

For more about speech sound development, go to:
http://teachmetotalk.com/2009/08/31/speech-sound-development/
 
If you are concerned about your child’s speech and language development, talk with a speech-language pathologist:
http://www.slp4u.com/contact.html
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