Kids’ speech development can take longer than parents expect. Parents sometimes worry about their child’s speech sounds when they are coming up to school age.
But what sounds can you expect your child to say?
As all parents know, children start experimenting with sounds from a very young age. They enjoy babbling and generally trying things out. There are 44 speech sounds in English and they don’t all come along at once. Some sounds are fairly easy to make. Other sounds require all sorts of gymnastics, with precision teamwork between the tongue, lips, voicebox, jaw, palate and nose. Vowel sounds, like ‘ah’ and ‘ee’ are easy to make, so are on the ‘beginner level’ of the sound scale. Harder consonant sounds, like ‘g’ and ‘k’, come later.
Experts disagree about the exact ages by which different sounds are usually in place, but everyone agrees that some sounds come early, some in the middle of speech development and others later on. The early 8 consonant sounds are ‘m, p, b, d, n, w, y and h’. They’re fairly easy to produce and are usually mastered between one and three years old. Next up, and usually sorted between the ages of four and five, are the middle sounds ‘t, k, g, f, ng, v, ch and j’. Lolloping in at the rear are the hardest sounds to produce. These are ‘s, sh, z, l, zh (the sound in the middle of “treasure”), r and the two sorts of th’. Most of the late 8 consonants are in place by the age of six. The sounds ‘r’ and ‘th’ are usually the last of them all, so they might not be completely sorted until the age of seven.
Even once kids have all their consonant sounds in place, some combinations of sounds can still prove tricky to say. Let’s come back to the gymnastics analogy for a moment. Vowel sounds are in the beginners’ class. So, words like “car”, where you have one consonant followed by one vowel; or “bat”, where you have consonant-vowel-consonant, are relatively easy to get your tongue around. If you start putting two or three consonants next to one another in words, some high-level tongue manoeuvres are required. So, words like “spring” and “throng” are especially hard to say.
Some children have difficulty getting all of their speech sounds sorted out. ‘Speech delay’ is when a child’s speech sounds the same as that of a younger child. Sometimes children make unusual sound substitutions or say the same word in several different ways, for example saying the word “cat” as ‘gat’, ‘at’ and ‘nat’. When this happens, this is called a ‘speech disorder’. When children’s speech sounds are not developing as expected, speech and language therapy can help.
If you’d like ideas for how to help your child’s speech sound development, please check out my blog on kids’ speech ~ tips for parents. You can find this at www.happytalkbristol.co.uk Or you can get in touch with Happy Talk, using the contact details below.
| Kirsty Henderson ~ Speech and Language Therapist |
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Contact usCall Kirsty on O117 963 7129kirsty@happytalkbristol.co.ukwww.happytalkbristol.co.uk
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