Have you ever wondered why your child struggles to say certain words, even after practicing them over and over? It might seem like a simple problem, but speech is a surprisingly complex process that involves tons of different body parts.
My name is Jessica Abawag, and I’m the owner and Speech-Language Pathologist of Fluens Children’s Therapy in Tacoma, Washington, and Columbia, Tennessee. Today, we’re going to talk about why your child may struggle with certain speech sounds.
Most People Don’t Realize How Complex the Act of Speaking Is
The reality is that most people don’t realize how complex the act of speaking is. And that’s totally understandable, because speaking comes naturally to most people. It’s not something that you would intentionally think about.
But if you’ve got a child who is struggling to produce certain speech sounds, it becomes really important for you to understand some of the challenges that they’re facing. This is because speech is such a complex system, there are a lot of muscles and parts of the body that need to be coordinated in order for a person to speak fluently.
Sometimes Repetition and Correction Isn’t the Right Action
What we often see with families, and unfortunately even some therapists, is that they’re trying to get kids to pronounce and produce certain sounds just by hearing it alone. You may see a parent or a therapist telling a child, “Say apple, say apple.” That is only allowing the child to hear the word and get that auditory input with the expectation of imitating it or producing it.
And oftentimes, that’s not enough. If there’s not something else going on cognitively, then if hearing the sounds was enough for a child to start speaking, they already would be.
The Complex Mechanics of Speech
What we do as speech therapists is provide additional support beyond just hearing the word. But in order for us to do that, we have to understand the parts of the body that go into producing speech.
Now, this isn’t a science lesson or an anatomy lesson. This is a basic overview so you can understand what your child may be facing that’s causing them to be having trouble producing the sound or the words accurately.
Speech Involves the Brain
The brain is where the message is formed. Your child has an idea of what they want to say, and the brain helps coordinate the other parts of their body to say it. All of this typically happens in split seconds.
Oftentimes what we’ll see (especially in childhood apraxia of speech) is that a child may have an understanding of what they want to say, but there’s a breakdown that prevents them from saying it. This would need to be addressed to help them build their speech skills.
Speech Involves the Lungs
Another important body part for speech is the lungs. Now, as speech therapists, this isn’t something that we work on directly, but we might partner with a physical therapist or respiratory therapist to help a child improve their breath control.
A child has to be able to breathe air in and make it come through the voice box (also called the larynx) in order to make speech sounds come out. So, if there is a problem with the lungs, breath support, or breath control, we can partner with other medical professionals to handle that.
However, the voice box is the layering part in your throat where vocal folds vibrate to make sound. There could be a breakdown there, and speech therapy can help your child learn to better control that part.
Speech Involves the Tongue
The tongue is one of the most important muscles when it comes to speech because it moves in lots of different ways and is responsible for making lots of different sounds. The tongue needs to be able to elevate to make sounds like “ooh,” and it needs to be able to move in the middle to make sounds like “arr.”
It needs to be able to do lots of different things. And the tongue is often what we work on with kids.
Speech Involves the Jaw
The jaw is important for speech because it needs to be stable, and it needs to be able to move freely up and down to be able to connect sounds together. Example, for a word like “up,” the jaw goes down first for the “uh” sound, and then closes for the “p” sound.
The teeth perform a barrier for sounds like “ss,” and those are important. If a child has missing teeth, they may have trouble producing some of those sounds. Sometimes we can see speech sound issues if a child’s teeth are not aligned correctly, too.
Speech Involves the Palette, Lips and Cheeks
The palette is the roof of your mouth. There’s a hard palette directly above your tongue, and a soft palette further back toward your throat. Different sounds are produced in different parts of the mouth.
The cheeks and lips are responsible for producing sounds like “ooh” or “oh.” That’s why a child needs to be able to move their cheeks and lips appropriately, because those muscles are important for many different speech sounds.
Reach Out to Fluens for an Evaluation
There’s a lot that goes into speech, but I just wanted to give you a glimpse of how complex speech actually is and a breakdown of those areas where kids could need support to pronounce their sounds correctly.
If you feel like your child is really struggling to pronounce words or it’s really hard to understand what they’re saying, I encourage you to reach out to us for an evaluation to see how we can help support you.