Did you know that how your child hears and interprets sounds can play a significant role in their ability to read and speak clearly? For many kids, challenges with reading go beyond letters and sounds—it’s about how they process what they hear.
My name is Jessica Abawag, and I’m the owner and speech language pathologist at Fluens Children’s Therapy. We have locations in Tacoma, Washington, and Columbia, Tennessee. At our clinic, we provide speech therapy services for kids ages 18 months to 18 years. Today, we’re going to talk about how your child hears sounds and how that can impact their reading and speech.
Many Children Struggle with Reading Due to Phonological Awareness
Often, we’ll see kids who come in because parents or teachers are concerned about their reading skills. One thing that we always check for any patient that comes in with reading struggles is their hearing. If that checks out okay and there are no hearing problems, then we look at how your child is hearing sounds in words specifically.
It’s not necessarily how they’re reading the words, but how they’re hearing the sounds that can affect their reading. And this is an area that we call phonological awareness, which is the ability to recognize and work with sounds in spoken language.
Examples of Phonological Awareness
We’re looking at how your child is hearing words to determine if they are able to understand the differences in sounds because that will transfer to how they’re reading. Here are some examples of how we can do that:
Can Your Child Recognize Rhymes?
One of the areas of phonological awareness is rhyming. Again, we’re just thinking about how your child is hearing words, hearing sounds, and putting them together basically in their mind, when they’re reading.
Can your child tell you a word that rhymes with “cat”? Or if you ask if the words “cat” and “hat” rhyme, can they answer correctly? If you ask if the words “cat” and “pot” rhyme, can they answer correctly?
Can Your Child Recognize Syllables?
Another area of phonological awareness is syllables. This is listening to a word and being able to tell you how many syllables or parts of the word there are. Again, this has nothing to do with reading, just listening to a word.
If you ask your child to tell you how many syllables or sounds are in the word “butterfly,” can they answer that? Can they clap or tap out the three sounds: 1) but, 2) ter, and 3) fly? That’s what we’re looking for them to be able to do.
Can Your Child Combine and Separate Words?
Another area of phonological awareness is blending. This is where you give your child two parts of a word to see if they can put them together. For example, if you get your child to say “base,” and get them to say “ball,” can they put those words together correctly to say “baseball”?
The opposite of that is what we call segmenting. You give your child one word and see if they can break it into two parts. For example, if you say the word “farmer,” can your child tell you the two different parts of that word, “farm” and “er”?
Again, it’s all about how your child is hearing the sounds and the words. Are they able to manipulate those sounds that way? Because if they are, the chances of them reading fluently increase.
Reach Out to Fluens Children’s Therapy for An Assessment
This is a quick snapshot of what phonological awareness means. There’s a lot more that goes into it, but we, as speech therapists, can help your child build these skills for improved reading.
If this is an area where your child has struggled before, give us a call to see if we can help support your child, especially if they’re not yet reading because we want to prepare them for reading. Or if they’re already struggling with reading, give us a call and we’ll do an evaluation to see how we can help.