Our daughter is said to have an
ABSENT speech
motor. She has apraxic speech, but many words. She read her own name when
she was 19 months old. (teaching her to read was part of our way to motivate
language
development). She has said a few syllable sequences of 5 to 7 syllables,
such as
"Where'd you go daddy?" or "Where's my dowar (for dollar)?".
Think in terms of the first sounds to develop that are the simplest to make.
These
are the vowel sounds. Try to prompt for having Cameron imitate a monkey
(ooh-ohh).
Sing song the vowel sounds is helpful. (ay-ay, ii-ii, etc.) When it can be
fun, wild
and crazy, it is more motivating and reinforces him to try more
vocalizations.
As you
begin to hear these sounds you would add a consonant to the sound. Speech
therapy
calls this consonant vowel sequences, it might be "may-may" "mee-mee" "my-my"
"mo-mo" "moo-moo". You would work on just the sing song of "may may" for a
while
trying to prompt him to make that sound, then move to the next consonant
vowel
sequence of "mee-mee" as your sing song until you've gone through the five
"c-v" sounds.
The M sound is considered a bilabial sound (or 2 lips sound), next you would
work
in the same progression only replace the M sound with another bilabial sound,
such
as B (bay-bay, bee-bee, by-by, bo-bo, boo-boo) working on each sequence (such
as
bay-bay), one at a time.
The other bilabial that you would work on, is P
sound with (pay-pay, pee-pee, py-py, po-po, poo-poo). You might work
on these for a while and then switch to alveolar sounds, the D,N, T and L in
the same
pattern. The tongue positions behind the front teeth for these sounds
(day-day, dee-dee,
and so on....).
The velar sounds would be K and G (more like kuh, and guh,
as in
kay-kay or gay-gay), with velar sounds the tongue backs up in the mouth to
make those
sounds.
Next might be labiodental with F and V sounds (teeth on the lip).
As
you make progress you would add harder sounds like S, Ch, Th and so on
(say-say,
or chay-chay). Try to position him so that he can watch your mouth while
doing these
excercises.
The next levels (which may be a year or two from now) would be sounds with
consonant-vowel-consonant sequences, like bib, bub, bab.......mib, mub,
mab.....pip, pup, pop (here are the bilabials again)
The point of all this, that sounds like baby babble is to guide your child
into hearing
and making the sounds used for speech.
One "biggie" the you spoke of wanting to hear was "MAMA". A fun little game
that we used to do....was to have me leave the room and daddy starts to yell
really
loudly "MAMA.....MAMA" and then mama would come back. Do this a few times
until you've reinforced that yelling for mama, makes her come back. Then
when
you leave the room have him ask Cameron, "where did she go?....call her"
This is
how we were able to have our daughter start to see the power of using words
and
giving her a desire to use them. We would hide a cookie behind our back
after showing
it to her and yell "COOKIE" and then bring it out, we would do that a few
times
and then hide it and wait to see if she would yell anything (don't worry if
it doesn't
sound quite like the word you are prompting for, just get him vocalizing, you
are merely
prompting and reiforcing him to vocalize).
Evan might have said "awber" for
strawberry
or "ooh bear" for Pooh bear.....once you are getting this kind of
vocalization then the
consonant vowel sequences help to pull the right sounds out.
Now at 4 and a half, Evan says "hungry", (and she says that OFTEN!!)
"pretty", and lots of other words and some phrases. In the beginning, many
of her words had "uh" added
to the end of them, such as "up-ah" for I want up. She would have "bwuh-ah"
for blue.
The more time and practice that she has had, this has improved. However, she
feels
a lot of pressure when trying to speak for others and her speech becomes much
harder
to produce.
We are still working....another thing that has helped us alot at this point
is to ask
her a question with two choices such as "Do you want the red or blue?" "Are
you
you sleepy, yes or no?"
On the yes or no question, she says "yeeaah"
sometimes
and other times she says "ess". For no she usually says "naahh".
By
prompting for
an answer between two choices it sometimes helps you to have a better idea of
what
they have said....for example if Evan had a choice between orange and green,
she
might say "oran" for orange or "geen" for green.
By isolating her down to
two
choices it is more likely that I can reinforce her verbalization and say
"okay, green it is!"
because I'm fairly sure she said greeen.
In the very early language development phase as I was teaching Evan colors
from
the KidPaint program on our computer, I would hear her make the ENDING
consonant
of the color black, it would be "kuh" when she saw black and she would make
the ending color of red as "duh" when she saw red.
I would the reinforce the
vocalizing
of her having told me the name of black, so that she would know I knew she had
SAID black. I would make a big deal about her saying black (even though
"kuh" was all she could get to come out). I would say that is
VERY good, it IS black, WOW. She would grin broadly and I know her heart
became
motivated to try to make more sounds.
This is what I mean when I say that
Speech Therapy is made up of many different aspects.
Another thing that I
did early
on, for her to understand what it means to "SAY" something, I would tell her
what
a dog, cow and cat says.
I would say a cat SAYS "meow" (trying to sound very
cat-like,
hah!). I would then ask, can you SAY "meow"?. By doing this she could
learn to
understand when I wanted her to say something I was saying.
Lots of time you
hear people use go instead of say, like cows GO moo, I did not want her to
GO moo,
I wanted her to realize to say moo.
Then later you can start to prompt with
"Can you say.....? (and then fill in the prompt word) and they can understand
what "say" means. It is also helpful in the beginning to prompt for those
things that important to him. If he likes balls, try for ball. If he likes
to ride in the wagon, try for wagon.
Food items are
good too, if he has certain things he likes (one of Evan's food words was
"i-cree" for
ice cream). Also getting him to say "mmmmm" when something taste good is a
good biblabial excercise.
Most of all try to make it as FUN as possible.
Hope you hear him yelling mama soon (in the beginning Evan could only call me
when
she was crying, then it became "ahma" and now it is mama".)
Oh yes, one other big point. Try not to give him things when he is grunting,
whining,
or some other not so fun sound. If you give in, you are reinforcing him to
ask that
way again.
Always give him something as immediately as possible when you hear
an associated consonant, like "buh" for ball. Even if the word is a partial
sound, that is
fine, it will take time for him to refine complete words.
So think in terms
of positive and immediate rewards for word sounds and NO POSITIVE
reinforcement (such as giving him
the item), if he is whining. Evan was told many times during her second
year, "DON'T whine, use words!". It is hard to be that tough, but it does
help an awful lot to not give in.
Good luck!
Sincerely,
Joan
P.S. For the mom asking about signing, The Timberdoodle catalog, has some
good signing resources, I think I recall seeing that you can buy a VIDEO for
learning to sign.
This homeschooling family teaches their healthy PREVERBAL
toddlers to sign and
they feel that it really empowers their children to express their wants
without having
to resort to whining or temper tantrums.
Just do a search on the internet
for Timberdoodle and ask for their catalog, they have lots of great
homeschool items at
good prices.