Teach Me How to Say It Right

Q. Imagine you are talking to a first-time parent who’s just had a baby and wants to know what to expect when it comes to his or her child’s speech development. What’s the normal developmental timetable and what are some red flags that they should be aware of?

A. Before most children can say real words, they communicate with a wide range of sounds, gestures, and facial expressions. As your child grows, he will develop control over the physical parts that enable him to speak, and he will continuously expand and change the sounds that he can make. Beginning shortly after birth, babies learn to control their mouths and airflow by coughing, burping, and crying. Around two to four months of age, your baby should begin to coo, squeal, and gurgle. These sounds are regular and repetitive, and they sound as if your baby is making vowel sounds.

Around two to seven months, babies like to entertain themselves by producing new sounds and repeating them. At around six months of age, babies begin to make sounds with their mouths partially closed. These sounds are called consonants and the first consonants that most babies add to their cooing are /k/, /p/, /m/, and /b/. Soon after, when your baby is better at controlling her vocal apparatus to repeat sounds, she may begin to put vowels and consonant sounds together and repeat them over and over again. This is called babbling.

Around the ninth to twelfth month, your baby’s babbling will include many more sounds. When these sounds are strung together into phrases and sentences they are called jargoning. At around twelve months of age, most children can move their articulators in a meaningful way to say real-sounding words. Even though by eighteen months, most children can use meaningful speech, many cannot say all the sounds of their language correctly. By approximately thirty months of age, your child should be able to produce all the vowel sounds correctly. However, for many children the ability to say all consonant sounds develops more slowly.

Q. Can you give us an overview of the different types of speech disorders?
A. Speech is the actual physical production of sounds. If your child’s speech sounds are different from his peers who are the same age, gender, or ethnic group, or if she frequently avoids talking because she is hard to understand, she may have a speech-sound disorder. Children with a speech-sound disorder may be having difficulty in one or more of the following areas:

Articulation: A child with an articulation disorder does not pronounce words clearly and precisely because he uses the wrong sounds when speaking, or because he omits sound in words. For example: “cookie” is pronounced “tottie.”

Phonological Processes: A child with a phonological processes disorder has not mastered the sound pattern of a language. This can manifest itself in a number of ways. He may omit the first sound in a word, so that, for example, “mice” is pronounced “ice.”

Fluency: A child with a fluency problem has interruptions or disfluencies in the normal flow of her speech. For example: She may repeat a sound when talking, such as, “T-T-T-Tom.”

Voice: A child with a voice problem has difficulty with the way his speech sounds. His voice may be too loud, too soft, or too hoarse. The quality of a child’s voice may interfere with normal everyday activities or make the child’s speech difficult to understand.