Cued Articulation - a useful technique? Any tips or info?

[lougle]

DD1's (7.1) draft statement review has come through prior to her Annual Review. Her speech sounds are still very unclear -I can understand her 90% of the time, at least by the second hearing of what she's trying to say. I'd say DH understands 80% of the time. Grandparents 75% of the time but she sees them most days. Everyone else, I often have to interpret for.

She seems to have many sounds 'missing' still. For instance, she'll say 'Tamaron' instead of 'Cameron', 'kick' instead of 'click', 'peetato' instead of 'potato', 'tips' instead of 'chips'. 'wobbie' instead of 'Robbie'. 'zame' instead of 'Zane'. 'fost' instead of 'frost'. The list goes on.

I noticed in her annual review pack that they've added in that she'll start 'cued articulation' in conjunction with SALT.

Does anyone have any experience or info which I could read?

plenty of info here

we've not long started using it, in a limited way with dd3, she's deaf and a bsl user, still missing most of her consonant sounds so we're just using it for specific sounds rather than as a signing system, if that makes sense. Currently she's doing 's' and 'sh' and has to discriminate between the sounds in words after lots of practice of trying to make the individual sounds. Her salt seems to think it's going ok, I can certainly see that she's thinking about the sound she's making, whether it's right or not!

hi, we used cued articulation to great effect with ds1 who has asd and dyspraxia. He had a recent update assessment from the SALT and she said he had age appropriate phonemes. 12 months ago he only had a few reliable phonemes and a handful of 1 or 2 syllable words that he could reliably reproduce. We are also doing lots of other stuff but I do think that cued articulation helped him a lot with speech sounds.

This is probably a stupid question but is it the same as cued speech? (i just clicked on Ninja's link and it looks different to the one we used which is referred to here: www.cuedarticulationtraining.com.au.
You can also google Jane Passey on youtube demonstrating some signs.

I'm sure they both work along similar lines, but it might be worth checking which one the SALT will be using...

I don't know about cued speech but the cued artic ones have a kind of logic to them, in that your hand does something representative of what your mouth/tongue/lips do to make the sound.

We did something like this for a time with dd in a salt group once. We did have a bit of success but it may have been more had it been more consistent. Also think dd was too young at the time. Interesting will be watching this thread.

I used it with some children over a few years when I worked in Special School - it was really effective for some children. If it is that difficult to understand her speech sounds at 7, then it's got to be worth a try, surely? Can't hurt, even if it doesn't help as much as you hope. That said, it really helped some of the children I worked with, but they had to be cognitively able enough to be able to think about how to produce different sounds, so didn't work with some children whose LDs were more severe.

Thank you all

BackforGood - DD1 has MLD. I'm not sure if her speech issues are cognitive ie. she can't hear the sounds and thinks she is making the right sound, or whether they are physical - she has slightly low tone in other areas, so I wonder if her mouth muscles are lax and hard to co-ordinate?

She is definitely one of the most able children in her cohort. It seems that physical issues are starting to hold her back now. So, for instance, she seems keen to write, but her finger strength is low and so she finds it hard to form letters.

Possibly. We used to do games to help the children work on mouth muscles too - blow football and making faces in mirrors and so on, as there could well be a link, and even where there's not, they were all fun things to do.

Re the finger strength - do you have the MN list of fun activities for finger and hand muscle strengthening? I keep thinking I should have saved it, but I can't find it. I'll have a look and if no-one else posts it first, and I can't find it, I'll type out a few things I recommend at the moment, either later, or tomorrow (sorry, there's a queue for the PC at the moment).

sorry, yes, wrong link, have been reading a lot recently Dd3 has motor issues too which doesn't help with trying to get the signs or the placement of them correct but it's encouraging her to think about the sounds she makes which important. She has it on her timetable to do everyday along with pulling faces to try to get her the control of her movements, it needs a lot of reinforcement for her.

For ds we made a video of people he liked, each making several cued artic sounds whilst doing the actions (hand and mouth parallel to each other, in close up). I did it in clusters like one week 't' and 'd' for example. In this case the sign is similar but with a slight difference that shows one is 'voiced' and one isn't. Anyway, ds (perhaps because of his autism) found the videos weirdly hypnotic and reinforcing, and chose to watch them several times per day. We were told (by VB consultant) to just 'expose' him to the sounds and the signs, and not demand anything of him in the beginning. He has poor motor planning and never even attempted the hand signs. But after a while the sounds started coming.

I don't know about cued articulation, but ds1 salt recommended this Nuffield dyspraxia programme which sounds similar to cued articulation and is proving useful.

THis is all really helpful, thank you!