What is Articulation Therapy ?
Articulation therapy is one approach that helps a child when they are having difficulty producing a specific sound.
This difficulty producing a specific sound might show up day-to-day for a child as:
- Feeling frustrated and/or embarrassed that peers/family/teacher aren’t able to understand them in conversations.
- Social and emotional implications – difficulty initiating and maintaining friendships due to reduced speech clarity, avoiding certain situations as they may feel embarrassed.
- Literacy difficulties – the child may be spelling words how they are saying them (e.g. them → dem | thumb → fum).
In articulation therapy, a child will learn how to correctly place their tongue, teeth and lips to produce the sound.
How Does Articulation Therapy Work?
Articulation therapy helps individuals improve their ability to produce speech sounds correctly, leading to clearer and more understandable communication. This process typically involves several key stages, beginning with a comprehensive assessment to identify specific speech sound errors, followed by structured therapy sessions, and culminating in conversational practice to generalise newly learned skills into everyday speech.
The aim of articulation therapy is for the child to correctly produce the target sound. Correct sound production occurs when the articulators (tongue, lips and teeth) are in the right place.
Articulation Therapy Stage 1:
Initial Consultation
In your first session, your speech therapist will complete an initial consultation with the child’s parent or caregiver to gather background information and guide the assessment process.
Articulation Therapy Stage 2:
Assessments and Formulating Goals
Your speech pathologist will complete a number of speech assessments over a few speech therapy sessions to gather more information about the best treatment moving forward. These may include a:
- Comprehensive assessment such as the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP). This assists with diagnosing a speech disorder and gathering baseline information to formulate goals.
- Connected speech sample, which gives great information about the child’s vocabulary, sentence length and complexity, and articulation abilities. This can be done during game play or book reading.
- Multisyllabic words screener, reviewing words with more than one syllable in them (for example “table” (two syllables), “tomato” (three syllables) or “superhero” (four syllables). Children with speech sound difficulties can find saying these multisyllabic words challenging. Targeting multisyllabic words in therapy can assist with increasing a child’s clarity.
- Parent questionnaire, such as the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS). This scale can help gather baseline information about the impact of the child’s articulation difficulties across different environments.
Integrated with the initial consultation and assessment phases, your speech therapist will discuss and formulate goals with your family based on assessment results.
Articulation Therapy Stage 3:
Attending Speech Therapy Sessions
Speech therapy sessions for kids are tailored to their interests, while working towards the goals set and incorporating articulation therapy techniques. To build up a child’s speech clarity and confidence, a speech pathologist will build skills by targeting:
- Auditory discrimination (hearing the difference between error and target sound)
- Isolation
- Syllables
- Single words
- Phases
- Sentences
- Structured conversation
- Unstructured conversation
- Generalisation (across all environments)
Articulation Treatment Techniques
During the assessment process, the speech pathologist will determine the type of speech sound disorder your child presents with and choose the most appropriate intervention.
A speech pathologist will use a combination of articulation therapy techniques to assist a child with their sound production. These techniques used in speech therapy for kids include:
1.
Use of cuing:
Verbal cues (e.g. put your tongue up and back)
Visual cues (pictures, gestures, use of a mirror)
Tactile cues (to show the correct placement of the articulators e.g. child touching their throat when working on back sounds /k/ and /g/)
2.
Aiming to repeat a sound 50-100 times per target sound each session
(or in speech therapist terms – aiming for 50-100 trials per target sound each session)
3.
Giving positive reinforcement to help keep the child motivated throughout the session.
4.
Completing articulation activities for speech therapy during the session that are of interest to the child.
These activities could be feeding a puppet, doing a puzzle (can give a puzzle piece after each practice), Pop Up Pig/Pop the Pirate, stickers and stamping, memory games, pop-it toys, magnet wands and chips.
Benefits of Articulation Therapy
Treating articulation errors is important to reduce social and emotional implications for the child when they are not being understood and to ensure literacy and language skills are not being impacted. Complete articulation therapy has lifelong key advantages for a child, including that the child is able to:
- Engage in positive social and communication interactions with more confidence
- Express their needs, wants, thoughts and ideas adequately
- Increased independence (not having to rely on others to talk for them)
- More confidence across different environments (e.g. school, sports training, ordering food at the cafe)
See the Benefits of Articulation Speech Therapy Sooner
Book in a free discovery call with a Pop Speech Therapist to discover how your child can get started (without the waitlist!)
When is Articulation Therapy Used?
Articulation therapy is one approach to support a child with a speech sound disorder (SSD). A speech sound disorder is when a child has difficulty producing certain sounds and it persists past the expected age impacting their ability to be understood. Examples of speech sound disorders include:
- Substitution: when one sound is replaced by another (e.g. /l/ → /n/ “line → “nine”
- Omission: when a sound is omitted in a word (e.g. “green” → “geen”)
- Distortion: distorting sounds in words (e.g. /s/ may sound ‘slushy’ in the word “sun”)
- Addition: when an extra sound is added into the word (e.g. “black” → “b uh lack”
What is the Goal of Articulation Therapy
Articulation therapy focuses on helping children develop age-appropriate speech clarity skills. The key goals of this therapy extend beyond just clear speech, aiming to improve a child’s overall quality of life by enhancing their communication abilities, fostering confidence in social interactions, and supporting their academic development.
Working on these goals may support a child across a number of environments. For example:
- Completing an oral presentation in front of the class
- Engaging in team sports
- Going to a birthday party
- Participating in mat time at child care/school
- Making new friends at the park
- Having conversations with their family about their day
When Should You Consider Articulation Therapy
It is common for young children to have speech errors as their speech and language skills develop. These errors are referred to as phonological patterns. Children are expected to ‘grow out’ of these by a specific age.
We recommend reviewing Speech Pathology Australia’s guidelines for the development of individual sounds here.
Signs of a Speech Sound Disorder by Age
Speech sound disorders normally appear around 2-3 years of age in typically developing children.
If you notice that your child’s speech is hard to understand and you are frequently ‘interpreting’ for them during communication interactions with friends or other family members.
As a parent, you may recognise signs of a speech sound disorder in your child based on their speech patterns at certain ages.
Here’s what to look out for:
3 Year Old Child Signs Of A Speech Sound Disorder
- Leaving sounds of the ends of words (final consonant deletion). Example – “cat “—> “ca”
- Your child is understood less than 75% of the time by unfamiliar listeners
- Your child has difficulty saying any of the following sounds: p, b, m, d, n, h, t, k, g, w, ng (as in wing), f, y,
6 Year Old Child Signs Of A Speech Sound Disorder
- Your child is understood less than 100% of the time by unfamiliar listeners
- When your child uses /w/ for /r/ (e.g. rabbit → wabbit) or /w/ or y for /l/ (e.g. lion → wion)
- Your child has difficulty saying any of the following sounds: l, j, ch, s, v, sh, z, th, r
8 Year Old Child Signs Of A Speech Sound Disorder
- Your child has difficulty producing any sounds in words
- Your child is understood less than 100% of the time by unfamiliar listeners
- Is avoiding talking
- Is having difficulty with literacy tasks
Tips for Supporting Articulation Therapy at Home
Share actionable advice for parents and caregivers to reinforce therapy techniques and encourage practice in everyday situations.
We know it can be hard to find the time to do home practice. Evidence suggests that completing follow up home practice makes a huge difference in the child’s outcomes.
At Pop Online Speech Therapy, try to make home practice as simple and functional as possible. Your speech pathologist will work with you to find ways to add practice times into your day.
Examples of Articulation Therapy for Kids at Home:
- Reading books: finding pictures in the book that start with the target sound
- In the car: each choosing words that have the target sound
- I spy/scavenger hunt: searching for items that start with the target sound
- Card games (e.g. memory) with picture cards
- Colouring/drawing together
- bath/shower time: using letter tiles
- During mealtimes
Start Your Speech Therapy Journey with Pop Family!
Articulation therapy is one approach that can be used to support your child’s speech development. Your Pop speech therapist can support your child’s speech sound disorder journey and help your family implement strategies at home so your child can make leaps and bounds towards their articulation therapy goals.
If you are concerned about your child’s speech development, reach out for a free discovery call or book a speech therapy assessment.
