cant say 'sp' sounds.

[misdee]

dd1 is 4years old, and cant really say her s sounds or sp, and a few others. space comes out base. her nursery havent mentioned it, but i have noticed as has my younger sister. what should we do?

My dd1 was like this with all "s+consonant" words - snake used to be hake, for instance. She also couldn't do "k" - cake, kate, take all came out tate - or "l" in the middle of a word, milk was like "miwk" and hill was "hiw".

Some sounds just take some children longer - she could say them all eventually - I wouldn't worry yet.

Ds is only 2.8 but has seen a speech therapist a few times as his speech is sometimes hard to understand. Anyway, the SALT lady gave me a sheet about normal development of the speech sounds, (which thankfully we do fall into) but it says on the bottom.

"Many children starting school (some at just 4 years) are still distorting the more difficult sounds (eg, a lisp on the 's' sound) and simplifying clusters (eg, 'boon' for 'spoon'. Their speech is still within normal limits for development"

Hope this puts your mind at rest.

Sorry, don't know where winky came from

ditto furball
took ds2 to therapist last week , he is 3.5
she said consonant blends are allways the last to come "Gr" and so on

tip to get the K right is to make them practice woth the finger holding their toungue down. ds has come on a treat sinc ethen

DS2 is almost four and is having similar problems, mainly with 'hard' constanants. TBH I didn't really notice until he started nursery, and I heard kids his own age speaking. I spoke to his HV, who wasn't too concerned but directed me to a 'walk-in' SALT. She agreed that he is slightly immature with his pronunciation (his vocab is excellent - its just difficult to understand him sometimes) We agreed to leave it for a couple of months to see if he caught up on his own.

In the meantime his nursery teacher ia getting concerned, because she's having trouble understanding him in the noisy class environment. But, she's been going on courses about speech and language development and is very keen on addressing any problems early. She has arranged (with parents permission) for a SALT to come into the class and work with DS and about 3 other kids. I'm really happy with this, DS could catch up on his own but it won't hurt to help him along, and its better than waiting until there is a big problem.

sp is one of the hardest sounds to produce so is one of the last to develop. It's normal for the entire range of speech sounds not to be in place until up to age 7. If you want her to practice just get some pictures of things with "sp" in and show her how to make the sounds. Just do it as part of a game- nothing too intense.

One thing you can get her to do as well is say ss, p, ss, p, ss, p, s, p s, p sp, sp, sp.

Sorry to butt in here but this reminded me that my ds (5) can't pronounce th properly. If he says three it will be pronounced free but he can say thank you - although sometimes he will do it here as well. Why can he pronounce some th words ok but not others?

debster - in the examples you give one word has the 'th' occurring before another consonant 'r', as in 'three', that's a pretty hard combination of sounds (like 'sp' it's a tricky consonant cluster). In the other word where your ds gets the 'th' pronunciation right the 'th' occurs directly before a vowel 'thank you'. I would say the 'th' is much easier to pronounce in that context. Given his pronuncation varies he may be in transition towards getting the prounciation right in all contexts ... though of course depending where you live he may also be being influenced by perfectly legitimate accents where 'f' for 'th' is the norm.

Misdee, my DS1 is nearly 5 and still struggles with some sounds especially blends as others have mentioned. Bl is bw, Pl comes out as Pr, g is usually missed off or given as d (so plug is actually prud, black is bwa - can be quite hard to understand if you are not used to him I suspect). Also C is always T (tar, torner for car and corner). This makes 'I spy' hard to play and we are sometimes reduced to doing the jolly phonics actions which can be scary if I'm drivign the car (C is clicking your fingers in the air like castanets!). Anyway, he saw a speech therapist at nursery last October and she said he was fine, in the range for his age, plenty to say etc. He was a late-ish talker anyway. I am aware of it but not unduly conerned (tho would like an improvement in the C sound soon. Have tried the tongue thing but it didn't seem to help but will persevere. Don't let your DD get upset/stressed about it. But do ask to speak to a ST if you want - maybe her pre-school can help contact one (ours did). With DS1 it's partly inability, partly laziness (he can say Year eg but always seems to say Ear). DD funnily enough at almost 3 is amazingly clear.