What is it?
Speech sounds are the sounds we make, using our mouth, to form words. To make sounds the brain needs an idea to communicate, then it send the idea to the mouth telling it which words to say and the sounds to make. This includes signals to the muscles that control the tongue, lips and jaw.
What to expect?
Children will form their accent based on their environment and what they hear, therefore it is common for children to use “f in place of “th” e.g. ‘thanks’ said as “fanks” or they may drop the ‘t’ sound in words like ‘letter’, ‘bottle’ and ‘boat’.
Watch our speech sounds videos here.
Information & advice
You can help by:
- Accepting a young person’s speech attempts as their best effort. They are not lazy when it comes to speech sounds; it is just that they are not ready and/or able to use the correct ones.
- Listening to what the young person is saying rather than how the young person is saying.
- Modelling back the correct word if the young person uses the wrong sounds.
- Modelling new or longer multi-syllable words lots of times for the young person so they can hear the sounds used. Clapping out the syllables in words to allow the young person to hear all parts of the word. E.g. te-le-phone. You could try clapping out your names, favourite foods or favourite TV or book characters.
- If the young person continues to have difficulty with their speech, please contact your school to discuss if a referral to the Speech and Language Service would be appropriate.
Watch our speech sounds video here.
