Henry

In the words in the three clips you have been looking at, you may have noticed that Henry has difficulties with these sounds:

In clip one

Spoon forging - Henry seems to say the first ‘s’ sound in spoon and the first ‘f’ sound in forging but the other sounds in the words are less clear.

Gardening - Henry doesn’t seem to say the ‘g’ sound at the start of the gardening or the ‘n’ sound in the middle of the word.

In clip two

Metal - Henry doesn’t seem to say the ‘t’ sound in the middle of the word.

In clip three

Words - Henry seems to say the ‘w’ sound at the start of the word but the sounds in the rest of the word are less clear.

Slow - Henry doesn’t seem to say the ‘l’ sound after the ‘s’ sound.

Again - Henry doesn’t say a clear ‘g’ sound. This sounds more like a ‘d’ sound.

You may disagree with some of the observations above. This is not a problem, although it is worth thinking why this may be. One issue, is that you know the words you are listening out for and so this makes the listener pre-empt the sounds he is going to hear and so the listener may perceive they have heard the sound when the speaker did not say them.

Perhaps think about if the task would have been easier or harder if you had not known the words you were listening for beforehand. Another issue is that watching Henry say the words may be easier than if you listened to him without seeing him on the screen.

Watching a speaker gives the listener lots of information about the words they are saying. Finally, everyone speaks and hears differently and there is much variation in how a group of people will say the same word and also how a group of listeners will perceive a word.

Earlier, we talked about how children usually only learn the speech sounds of the language or languages they are learning in their environment. Children usually learn the speech sounds of the language(s) they are learning in a similar sequence and at a similar rate.

By four years of age, children are usually considered to be speaking clearly or intelligible. Children may still have some unclear sounds and some sounds such as the ‘y’ sound in ‘yellow’ and the ‘r’ sound in ‘red’ may not be fully clear till seven years of age. This is all within considered typical development.

A broad distinction is made between speech difficulties where articulation is affected and speech difficulties where phonology is affected, and of course speech difficulties where articulation and phonology are both involved

Articulation

Generally refers to the articulators, the muscles used for speech, and the anatomy of the speech structures involved in speech. These can be affected by neurological damage, such as cerebral palsy; structural impairment, such as a cleft lip and palate; and more subtle neurological involvement, such as dyspraxia or childhood apraxia of speech, where the child finds it difficult to send the messages to the muscles and to coordinate these to make accurate speech sounds.

Phonology

Phonology is more complex to understand and here, knowledge of the typical development of speech sounds is helpful (see the resource mentioned above). There are many developmental checklists that detail the approximate ages at which children learn the sounds of the language(s) they are learning.

In English, sounds including ‘m’ and ‘b’ are reported to come first with ‘d, p, t, k’ coming later and subsequent sounds after that. This can be interpreted as the easier sounds to articulate coming before harder sounds such as ‘f’, ‘ch’ and ‘j’. These developmental checklists are all approximate and imply that children learn sounds in isolation and in an order. However, this is not necessarily always accurate. It is therefore important to think about the context of children’s speech and variation in typical development.

Phonology can be helpful here and is used to try and understand these children’s speech. In a very general sense, these children are considered to have immature phonological or speech sound development. For example, they may not have learnt the speech sound ‘p’ or they may be trying to say a ‘k’ sound but produce it as a ‘t’ sound.

The theory here is that these children have not learnt what is needed to produce the ‘k’ sound accurately, ie it is a sound made at the back of the mouth and involves the back of the tongue lifting up to the top of the mouth (palate) to momentarily block the air supply to then produce a ‘k’ sound.

With support, these children are expected to learn how to make the speech sounds they have not yet learnt or are producing incorrectly. The distinction between articulation and phonology is not always clear and many children will present with a more complex profile of articulation and phonology difficulties that impact on their speech development.

Regardless of whether speech difficulties are articulation or phonology based or both, children who have still have unclear speech at the age of five years are likely to continue with these difficulties into later childhood and adult life.

Henry talks about how his speech varies. Sometimes, it is “ok” and at other times it is “not ok”. This implies that he cannot always be in control of his talking and how effective his communication with others can be. Henry does not talk about speech, articulation or phonology.

At this individual level of experience, Henry talks about knowing what he is saying but others not understanding him. He talks about how long words are “not ok” but short words are “ok”.

It is interesting how he refers to these long words as more difficult than short words. It would be interesting to find out if it is the length of the words that are difficult or the complexity of the words, ie they may be short words but include sounds that are more difficult to say.

Henry is able to talk about his speech not always being “ok” and “hard” so from these we can assume that he is aware of his speech and that others don’t always understand him. He reports finding this “annoying”. He describes “knowing the words I mean” but other people not knowing what he is saying.

Henry explains how he can slow his speech down to help people understand him. Perhaps surprisingly, he is accepting of people asking him to repeat himself and to say it “over and over” until they do understand. This is interesting as many people would probably be uncomfortable asking someone to repeat themselves lots of times.