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Speech Sound Aquisition in Young Children

© Schatze Rasmussen

We all know that no two children are alike, right? For instance, I have one son who could sleep 14 hours a night and the other one, who is almost one year old, likes to sleep only about 7 hours a night. Children learn to sit, crawl and walk at different ages and in different ways, too.

It is also safe to say the we all have known early talkers and "late bloomers" who did not utter one sound till they were three years old. These children developed speech sounds differently. We also know that frequently these children had no direct need for speech therapy too.

Speech/language pathologists can often listen to a young child or toddler speak and within one minute make a rough judgement whether the child is having difficulty with speech sound aquisition or not. Many things need to be taken into consideration however, such as 1) is the child an only child or are there older siblings, 2) is the child interacting with others routinely or does he/she spend much time playing alone, 3) do the parents read books to the child or take him/her different places routinely, 4) does the child have a physical problem that makes it hard for them to interact, like a hearing loss.

With these questions aside, it has been shown that children do have similar patterns of development, generally speaking, as far as speech sound aquisition goes. Children learn to do eassier tasks before more difficult ones. The same holds true for speech sound development. Children are more apt to produce sounds that are easy to see, such as sounds made with the lips than the more difficult ones that have subtle features and tongue movements like an R sound. This has been found to be true universally. Fellow therapists and researchers have acknowledged these facts in other languages also.

I have found through the years in my profession that parents and other caregivers frequently do not understand what sounds are appropriate for children to begin using at different ages. We as parents all want to know what normal is, because lets face it, we all want to know how our children are doing relative to other children. I have had parents of three year olds complain their child was not producing the L sound correctly. They were frequently relieved to find out through discussion with me that it is ok for them to not use the L sound at such a young age, that it is an extremely difficult sound for such a young body to replicate.

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