Speech sounds
Speech sound errors can make your child difficult to understand. This can be frustrating both to the child when they aren’t able to get their message across and also to the adults who aren’t sure what the child is saying. Parents are often very tuned into their child and can understand everything that they say, but can unfamiliar people understand what your child is saying? By age 3.5 years unfamiliar people should be able to understand your child 70-80% of the time and by age 4 years they should be intelligible to strangers.
As adults, we take talking for granted but it is actually a very complicated process. We have to move our tongue, lips and teeth in very quick and accurate movements to make the sounds we need for different words. Some sounds are made with our lips together (e.g. /p/ and /b/), with our tongue lifting at the front behind our teeth (e.g. /t/ and /d/), our tongue lifting at the back (e.g. /k/ and /g/), biting down on our lip with our top teeth (e.g. /f/ and /v/) or pushing our lips forward (e.g. /sh/).
We learn sounds over a long period of time and some of the hardest sounds we don’t expect children to be able to produce accurately until they are 6 years old. This means that your child might be making some speech sound errors, but we would say these are typical for your child’s age and we wouldn’t be concerned. There is lots of research on the internet with different ages and expectations for speech sounds to develop. Below are the norms that we use at New Heights for determining whether your child has speech sound difficulties.
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/p/ like ‘pig’
/b/ like ‘boat’
/m/ like ‘mouse’
/n/ like ‘no’
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All above plus…
/t/ like ‘teddy’/d/ like ‘dog’
/k/ like ‘car’
/g/ like ‘gate’
/f/ like ‘feet’
/s/ like ‘sock’
/w/ like ‘window’
/h/ like ‘house’
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All of above plus
/v/ like ‘van’
/z/ like ‘zebra’
/ch/ like ‘cheese’
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All above plus
/sh/ like ‘shoe’
/j/ like ‘giraffe
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All above plus
/r/ like ‘rabbit’
If you are concerned about your child’s speech sounds and want support then get in touch. We would also recommend going to your GP and asking for an audiology appointment to check their hearing (read more about this here).