Winter Holidays and Snowman Speech Sounds Children love the winter holidays and practicing their speech sounds! It’s the holiday time! Your aspiring Christmas caroler may have difficulty saying his speech sounds. If your child says “no” for snow, “noman” for snowman, and “tar” for star, then your child is using the phonological pattern of consonant cluster reduction. If your child says “dandy dane” for candy cane, then your child is using the phonological pattern of fronting. We can help your child produce the /k/ and /g/ back sounds. Therapy targets are the correct productions. The target or correct form is contrasted with the sound your child typically produces. For example when a child is reducing clusters, we will choose snow, stop, and star to contrast with no, top, and tar. A second method of target selection for your child is using a phoneme collapse. When a child uses a phoneme collapse, a child substitutes a single phoneme for multiple phonemes. In this case, a multiple opposition approach is used. If a child uses “dup” for cup, “dat” for hat, “doz” for nose, and “do” for go. In this example, /k/, /h/, /n/, and /g/ have been collapsed to the /d/. The maximal opposition approach is suitable for children exhibiting multiple errors across multiple sound classes. At speech superstars, we use a variety of approaches to treat your child’s speech sound disorder. Every child learns best when they are actively engaged. Eventually your child’s speech will become increasingly intelligible. Furthermore, your child will be encouraged to generalize new speech production skills to other targets. Read More »
