As children are first learning to speak, we are all used to hearing them mispronounce words – sometimes in a very cute or funny way! Many parents assume they will just grow out of it, and most children do. But how do you know when it’s time to seek help with their pronunciation? Read on to find a few ways to understand the typical timeline for speech sound development.
Speech Sound Acquisition
You probably wouldn’t expect your child to be able to say “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” before they are able to say “mama”. Just as words can vary in their complexity, individual speech sounds also differ in how easy or difficult they are to produce. You can expect to hear sounds such as p, b, t, d, m, n, h, and w consistently as early as 2-3 years of age, while sounds like th and r are not as common until 5-6 years of age. See this journal article for more information, or this easy-to-digest graphic which summarizes the information.
Phonological Patterns
Aside from acquiring speech sounds progressively, another way children simplify speech as they are learning is through phonological patterns. Phonological patterns are a systematic way of changing the shape of a word or the manner in which a sound is produced in order to make it easier to say. These patterns are typical and disappear at predictable ages. You may be more familiar with several of these patterns than you might think! For example, fronting is when sounds typically made with the back of the tongue are instead made in the front (e.g., “dutty” for “ducky”); or weak syllable deletion, which is when the unstressed syllable is dropped in a multisyllabic word (e.g., “brella” for “umbrella”). See this chart for a brief list of phonological patterns and the ages at which they are typically repressed.
Intelligibility
Intelligibility refers to how much you can understand of what your child is saying and is measured by a percentage. By most estimates, children are typically 90-100% intelligible by the age of four, meaning others can understand them approximately 90-100% of the time. For comparison, this number is generally 25% at 18 months, 50% at two years, and 75% at three years. These numbers will vary slightly depending on if the child is talking to familiar or unfamiliar listener, and whether or not the context is known (e.g., referencing a picture book vs. sharing about something they did earlier that week).
At the end of the day, if most people are having a hard time understanding your child, this can be very frustrating – both for them and for you! Intelligibility is impacted by problems with speech sound acquisition or retention of phonological patterns. However, even if your child seems to be producing all age appropriate speech sounds correctly, intelligibility can still suffer from other factors, such as speaking too quietly, too quickly, or indistinctly (slurring/mumbling).
If you notice your child is not producing age appropriate speech sounds accurately, they are continuing to use phonological patterns past the typical age or repression, or you just simply can’t understand what they are saying, you can obtain a referral from your child’s pediatrician for a speech-language evaluation. If you are unsure whether or not speech-language therapy is right for your child, a speech-language pathologist will have the trained ear to help you determine if your child’s speech is developing typically, and can set you up with tools to support them regardless of if therapy is recommended or not. Give our Tukwila clinic a call at (206) 641-9540 to start services for your child!