Last week’s article on intelligibility answered the question:
How much (or what percentage) of what my child says should be understood by others?
You can read the last blog post for more on that.
This article seeks to answer another common question parents ask:
What specific sounds should my child be producing?
This question is most commonly asked by parents of younger children, so today’s article will focus on children ages 3-5. Next blog post, I’ll discuss speech sound development for older children.
If you look online for information on this topic, you may find conflicting information. It can be difficult to wade through all the charts and articles and find consistent answers to this question. Even my graduate school textbooks didn’t always agree on exactly when sounds should be formed, because there is a varied range which is considered typical. Thankfully, there are some general guidelines which are fairly consistent.
The following list includes red flag sounds. If your child cannot produce these sounds by the age mentioned, an evaluation by a Speech Language Pathologist is typically recommended.
These sounds should be produced at the beginning, middle, end of words. If you aren’t sure, ask a Speech Language Pathologist to complete a screening or evaluation. A full evaluation will typically include a conversational speech sample. Sometimes, a child can say these sounds perfectly well at the one word level (for example, a child says all the sounds in the word “dog”), but in conversation there are more errors (for example, when saying “I want to see the dog,” the sounds in the word “dog” are mispronounced). These errors at the conversation level can make a child very difficult to understand.
If your child is bilingual, speech sound development may be a bit different, and a Speech Language Pathologist may take speech samples in both languages.
If you live in the Rogue Valley and are concerned about your child’s speech sound development, my clinic in Ashland is currently accepting new clients. Feel free to contact me if you’d like more information or to schedule an evaluation.