Normal Speech

What is normal?

 

nor·mal

–adjective

1.

conforming to the standard or the common type; usual; not abnormal; regular; natural.

I've been wanting to get some videos posted, as a way to share Nate's progress in therapy.  This is Nate's normal speech.  Normal for him but abnormal in comparison to how a 3 year old should be talking.  Here he's saying something about a puzzle piece he's working with during one of his speech sessions.  Sometimes you can pick out things that sound like "words", usually just the vowel sounds in the syllables, but here, I'm not really sure what he's saying.  

Nate's been going to speech through the school district for almost 3 months.  He's getting better at some of the individual sounds, like /p/ and /t/.  The sound for t is one that's easiest for him.  Here, he's working on the word tree.  He knows the sign and his speech pathologist is trying to get him to say tree or a version of it (tee).  Some of the things I've read about working with apraxic kids, suggests that approximations of words are a good focus as well.  They've also been working on some hand signals to go along with the place where the sound is made, like the t sound being made in the front of the mouth, as opposed to the k sound being made in the throat.

     

One of the sounds he really struggles with is /s/, like in snake.  Instead of blowing air out of his mouth, he approximates the sound by blowing air out of his nose.

Here he's trying to say the word book.  Sometimes he can say the individual sounds, but many of the times, he's groping to find the right sound to say at the right sound and that's not even being able to string them together into a quick and complete word.

And finally....the word that I'm hoping he'll one day be able to say on his own.  He can make all the individual sounds for it, but stringing it together and using it is a whole other thing....

Some days are harder than others, when I think about all the conversations we're missing out on with him, or that he's missing out on with us.  He finds other ways to communicate with us, so it's not like he's silently watching the world go by.  I just often wonder if he'll ever learn how to talk.