Well, we’re coming up on our six month anniversary of Z starting speech therapy. Time sure does fly! Little Z is now 30 months old and talking up a storm. He had a tremendous spurt in language in the past month and will be graduating from private speech therapy next week! He’s now officially average, which I never knew would feel so good.
Z has made a lot of progress with his atypical phonological process of initial consonant deletion. While it’s possible he would have corrected this himself, I have no regrets from the past six months of therapy. He enjoyed the play-based environment and his therapist had a gift for motivating him. He would often do things for her that would surprise me. I think I got used to translating for him and perhaps enabled him as I didn’t want him to feel frustrated.
One of the best tricks I took away from speech therapy was to use fading cues. This method has worked really well with Z, especially to initiate multiple word phrases and asking questions, both of which he struggled with. It seemed that putting multiple words together was just as hard for him as putting multiple sounds together to make a complete word. While we do not know exactly what caused his speech delay, it seemed likely a problem with motor planning/praxis, i.e. apraxia. Even now, his sentences often sound disjointed, as if he is saying each word as its own sentence with pauses between. However, this is improving and he can now say two word phrases rather smoothly. The same is true for words where he used to delete the initial consonant. At first he learned to segment these words “maaah p”, then he started to put them together “maaahp” and then finally say it smoothly “map”.
Z had no problems making any of the sounds individually, except maybe r’s, which are difficult and later developing for most children anyway. Z actually had many speech sounds ahead of schedule and can say all of the letters of the alphabet and their sounds. The issue has always been using these sounds in words, putting them together. In fact, when he first started to use two word phrases, he would often simplify the words even if he was able to say them correctly independently. Often he’d drop the initial consonant off of the second word in the phrase, for example. It seemed like his brain would already be focused on producing the ending sound of the second word and would just skip over the beginning.
It’s hard to know whether any of these issues will affect him in the future or whether he will need any more therapy when he is older. We’re very optimistic, though and are thrilled with his progress. Early intervention will still be out once a week for another couple of months, but after that we should hopefully be done with speech therapy altogether!
I can only imagine how wonderful it must feel to know that your son’s speech is improving and now age-appropriate.
You mention motor planning difficulties/Apraxia. Was he acutually diagnosed with Apraxia or did he simply demonstrate some difficulties with motor planning? I’m worried about my own child, and I’m wondering if it is possible to have some motor planning “kinks” without a full-blown diagnosis of a disorder.
He wasn’t ever diagnosed with Apraxia, perhaps due to his age or how he presented. However, both of his regular speech pathologists (private and early intervention) commented about his issues with motor planning. It was one thing that seemed consistent among a lot of inconsistencies in his speech. So I would say that in his case it was just some kinks. One evaluator mentioned Z had low tone around his mouth. She recommended using blow toys, drinking from straws, etc. to try to help. The speech pathologist from early intervention didn’t feel this was valuable and said there have been more recent studies that shows that oral exercises don’t help that much with speech. It seems there are a lot of different opinions out there. If you have a concern, it’s definitely worth seeking an evaluation and some guidance on things you can try at home.