Early speech difficulties and their
relationship to literacy: What teachers
might expect in the classroom, and how
they might help.
Roslyn Neilson, Ph.D.
Speech-Language Pathologist
Lecturer, Faculty of Education, Wollongong University CHERI Conference, 1-2 September 2005
Overview
• Children with early speech and language
impairments are at risk of having later difficulties with reading and spelling.
• This has implications for early identification and monitoring of children at risk.
• Phonemic awareness (PA) is one of the important linking variables.
• PA remediation can and should take into account the nature of the children’s speech difficulties.
What kinds of speech and
language difficulties are relevant?
• Combined early language and speech
impairments are known to be a very serious risk factor for subsequent literacy problems.
• But recent research suggests that even mild
speech difficulties are a strong risk factor if they are still present at the time the child is
introduced to literacy.
• NB: The risk factor does not apply to speech problems associated with ‘peripheral’ causes (eg. cleft palate, cerebral palsy).
Identification of speech difficulties
in the early school years:
• Serious problems involve lack of intelligibility. • Common ‘mild’ problems at ages 5 to 6 years:
the child is generally intelligible, with some listener support.
– Consonant clusters reduced (boon/spoon). – Consonant substitutions (eg. t/k; d/g).
– Confusions amongst w, l, r and y.
– Lisping (/s/ distortion) is NOT a warning symptom. – Substitution of f/th may not be a symptom.
• On their own these errors may not be a concern; you should also look for patterns in the child’s speech.
Warning patterns associated with
‘mild’ speech difficulties:
• Stackhouse (1992): Children with dyslexia
often have
connected
speech that is
described as muffled, mumbled, jerky.
• Problems with
polysyllabic
words:
– Pronouncing familiar words – Learning new words
– Deletion of unstressed syllables – Sequencing errors
Example: Muffled speech, weak syllable
deletion, problems with /l/ and /r/.
Child: He will get the dog’s favourite thing and ?swap ?drop it over.
Ros: (Comment.)
Child: My dog … my got two favourite
things, a ball and his, um, fake bone and it’s a red (wed) one.
Ros: (Comment.) What’s your dog’s name? Child: Molly … uh, I got a boxer and a co’e spaniel. A boxer
called Molly, and a yittle … and my little dog called Abby. The boxer’s big. (Ros: What kind of dog?) Co’e spaniel.
Ros: (Comment.) Say this with me … cocker spaniel. Child: Cocker spaniel.
Example: weak syllable deletion,
sequencing errors – “No mistakes”
Context: I had noticed the child saying ‘stake’ for ‘mistake’ in conversation.
Ros: Say: I didn’t make any mistakes.
Child: I didn’t make any es..stakes. Ros: (Repeats sentence.)
Child: I didn’t make any es..s..stakes
Ros: Mistakes. Child: Mistakes.
Ros (Repeats sentence.)
Child: I didn’t make any mis..cakes
Ros: Do you want to try mistakes again for fun (?!!) Child: Stakes.
Ros: The first bit is mis … mistakes.
Child: Mistakes.
Ros: Good! No mistakes?
Child: No bisnakes.
Word-retrieval difficulties associated with imprecise speech:
Context: The ‘No Mistakes’ child also often said “I forgot” in conversation, when in fact he was familiar with the word. Ros: Remember the thing that was on
the leaf? What’s it called? Child: No response. Sigh.
Ros: I’ll say it, then you. Caterpillar. Child: Caterpillar. (Repeat?) Ca’erpillar. Ros: What is the sport you do?
Child: I forgotten. (Ros: Try again.) Child: Tae Kon Do.
Ros: Tae Kwon Do.
Children are often very aware of
their speech problems …
Ros: What’s that he’s singing into?
Child: Mic..ho?
Ross: Microphone Child: Mic..o..phone.
Child: That’s why … my teeth … can’t talk properly.
Speech difficulties as an
early-warning sign
Early identification:
– Speech difficulties are easy to observe, without the need for specialised testing.
– The difficulties may be apparent to parents
and teachers even before it is possible to sort out children on tests of phonemic awareness.
When you think a child has a
speech impairment:
• Monitor literacy progress carefully, and intervene early. This applies to parents as well as
teachers.
• When children do have speech difficulties, Marie Clay (Reading Recovery) has suggested that
phonemic activities should be avoided in early literacy work.
• BUT - recent consensus: You CAN introduce phonemic awareness tasks early; they will
accelerate literacy progress, and may indeed help speech as well (Gillon 2003).
Conceptualising the relationship between
speech impairment and literacy difficulties:
It is NOT the case that children’s writing and spelling errors simply mirror their speech errors.
Child A says: “Wight side.”
Child A writes: RIT SID or WIT SID Child B says “Wight side”.
Child B writes: RPPSMT
If we understand how the child’s speech system is working,
we will be more efficient at helping the child with
A theoretical model: Speech development,
lexical representations and phonemic
awareness.
Warning: This next section may seem a
little counter-intuitive.
It is a research area that is currently
buzzing with developments.
Some of what I’m going to say is still
speculative.
(See Conference Proceedings for
references.)
Lexical Representations as Icebergs in the Head: How are the words we know SPECIFIED?
We know ….
• What words mean.
Readily accessible
• How words sound (auditory specifications)
• How words are articulated (motor specifications)
And, once we are literate:
• How words are spelled.
Less
How are representations specified as
children develop language?
1. The Input side
Auditory representations are developed as babies …
• listen to people speaking, • start to understand what they mean.
Children’s lexical representations probably start off involving the general sound shape of syllables – an acoustic envelope, with few internal specifications.
2. The Output side
Babies babble, practising making sounds with the vocal tract. Then they use the sounds in meaningful words.
9 months: koo-koo 12 months: koo-kie
24 months: kookabuwwa 36 months: kookaburra
Their motor representations are first specified as syllable-sized articulatory gestures, with little internal detail. The most ‘basic’ gesture is a consonant-vowel (CV) sequence. The details come later, as words are refined.
To summarise: Moving towards
adult speech
• Babies do not learn their first words by stringing phonemes together.
• Rather, they start with syllable-sized units. • This means that the child’s early lexical
representations are specified at the level of the syllable, not the phoneme.
• With vocabulary development, more detailed, finer-grained specifications are included in the lexical representations, as more distinctions are made amongst words.
Fine-grained Lexical
Representations
In typical speech development, lexical
representations eventually become
detailed and precise enough for the child
to be able to notice PHONEME sized units
of information within the words.
This allows children to develop phonemic
awareness when they are exposed to
formal literacy instruction – they can
attend to detail within the syllable.
‘Precise’ versus ‘fuzzy’ speech:
• Evidence suggests that school-age
children with speech impairments have
‘fuzzy’ or coarse-grained lexical
representations (Elbro, 1999).
• It is likely that clear, precise speech in a
typically-developing five year old is
associated with relatively fine-grained
lexical representations.
‘Coarse’ or ‘fuzzy’ representations
and phonemic awareness:
• When children with coarse or fuzzy lexical
representations are exposed to the alphabet,
they don’t readily access segments smaller than the syllable.
• ‘Sounding out’ words remains a mystery, even if the children have been taught the letter-sound combinations separately.
• These children must be helped to discover the phonemes within words. That is, the potential phonemic cues in their own lexical
Phonemic Awareness:
The ability to attend to, identify and
manipulate the phonemes in words.
Note: PA is more than the simple ability to
discriminate sounds, or tell that words are
different. PA requires that you can
actually identify the phonemes and their
sequence in words.
Discovering the /k/ phonemes in car, back,
rocker, backpack, ski, quick, act, Max …
• There is no acoustic /k/ segment that is common to all these words.
• The words do, however, have in common the velar point of articulation for
/k/ (and to a lesser extent, an unvoiced quality).
• These features of the /k/ phoneme must be clearly specified in the child’s lexical representations if the child is to work with /k/ sounds in reading and spelling.
Example: A child with weak PA
Ros: Can you tell me, what’s the difference between snack and smack? How are they different? Child: They’re the same. (Some discussion)
Ros: But how can you tell which one I said, if they sound the same? Child: Snack, smack. (Pointing to picture).
Ros: Write ‘snack’.
Educational Implications:
Do phonics programs help children to make
phonemic distinctions salient?
• Letter chart approaches - C and K say /k/ for cat and king. Assume PA will emerge on its own. (Luckily it often does.)
• Ants in the Apple type approaches - Camels coughing, c..c..c. May work indirectly, through sheer bombardment.
• Letterland – narratives around the phonemes, and lots of bombardment. • Jolly Phonics – gestures and images (castanets clicking), which are catchy
and learnable, but may be confusing if child has weak PA.
• THRASS and Spalding – lots of systematic modelling of phonemes. • Reading Recovery – Elkonin boxes (move counters into boxes to show
c..a..t) – simple modelling.
ALL depend on PA emerging via modelling and/or bombardment. The teacher models what is in his/her own lexical representations. If this fails, give more of the same. No explicit help is planned for helping children to identify phonemes within their own lexical representations.
Explicit help for when PA needs
scaffolding:
• Focus on
articulation
.
– Children can see and feel the relevant mouth movements and points of contact, as well as listening for the phonemes.
– They can use their own articulation as a resource.
• Articulatory features provide many
consistent cues to phonemes, while the
acoustic cues often vary.
How technical does explicit PA
scaffolding need to be?
• A current controversy: should we teach
children about the articulation of ALL
phonemes, or do we only need to focus on
those phonemes that are difficult to extract
from the speech stream??
– Cf. the Lindamood LiPS program, versus a
range of less expensive and less complicated adaptations and variations.
My personal preference for making
phonemes more salient:
• Keep it simple. Use auditory cues whenever they are easy to segment from the speech stream – e.g. /s/, /m/. Attach these cues to letter names. • Also routinely familiarise children with their own
mouths – attend to how sounds look and feel. • This builds confidence in a strategy: Your
mouth knows what the sounds are. Say the word and ask your mouth to tell you.
When phonemes do not emerge
easily from the syllable envelope:
• Plosives
p, b, t, d, k, g
are problematic.
– They are fast moving and can’t be prolonged. – By the time you’ve said the sound, the
articulatory information has disappeared.
• Strategy: I present plosives as “
GET
READY”
sounds. Point out the place of
articulation during the Get Ready phase.
Making plosives salient (cont.)
• Use mirrors and fingers (clean) to locate
the place of articulation. Get ready for:
– /p/ and /b/: lips closed. – /t/ and /d/: tongue tip up.
– /k/ and /g/: back of the tongue up.
• Use iconic hand gestures to mirror the
plosive quality, and also to reflect the
place of articulation.
Plosives and voicing:
• Explain the voicing
distinctions (p, t, k versus b, d, g). Feel and listen for the throat vibrations (Super Mouth’s engine room).
• Note: you need to listen for cues in the adjacent
vowels, too.
• Anticipate voicing
confusions with plosives at the ends of syllables.
Practise contrasts in sorting games.
Clarifying the POSITION of
phonemes in the syllable:
• Stretch or slow down single-syllable
(CVC) words in order to locate middle
and end phonemes as well as the
beginning sound.
• A useful gesture cue: the ‘chewing
gum stretch’ makes the location of the
phonemes more concrete.
Scaffolding PA problems with
consonant clusters:
• Help children to identify the separate
phonemes in consonant clusters,
especially the internal sounds. For
example:
– the /p/ in spoon: feel the lips closing. – the /n/ in went: feel it in your nose.
• There are predictable problems with /tr/
and /dr/; it helps if children attend to the
place of articulation as they ‘Get Ready’.
Coping with polysyllabic words:
• Break longer words into manageable
chunks, and show children which syllable
goes where. Use a visual/spatial cue, not
just clapping.
• Keep stress patterns accurate:
– Locate and ‘anchor’ the stressed syllable. – Help with the timing of unstressed syllables. – Keep the vowel pronunciations accurate.
Example: Helping with polysyllabic words
or How to say mafematical!
Conclusions
• Speech impairments are important when it comes to literacy development.
• Relevant phonemic awareness strategies are easy to incorporate into routine classroom
activities.
• But the strategies demand good understanding of phonetics on the part of the teacher.
• SO: Wouldn’t it be useful if teaching institutions offered basic phonetics as part of the language and literacy curriculum …?
