Speaking – have you ever thought about the amount of ‘behind the scenes’ work that goes into saying a short sentence? From knowing the message that we want to send across, to knowing words that we want to say and the order we should put them in to make the sentence make sense, to how the muscles of our face need to work as a team to pronounce the words in an understandable way. There’s a lot for our brain to do so that we can get our message across so that other people can understand what we want to tell them!
Speech requires precise neuromuscular motor coordination, simply put, moving our jaw, cheeks, lips, and tongue in specific way to make sounds in a sequence that make words that mean something takes really quite intricate planning on the brain’s part, and very quickly to add to that! Try saying “hi, my name is…” or ”can I have a glass of water please?” aloud. Pay attention to how many places in your mouth your tongue hit, in such a short amount of time.
Speech is one form of communication, it is the physical act of speech i.e. the way we make sounds and words, or, pronunciation. It is ONE way of communicating – think of how body language, facial expression, writing, signed languages are all ways that we can get our thoughts across to one another. Speech also includes intonation (think about a questioning tone, versus an angry tone of voice), voice quality (speaking with a breathy voice or with a nasal quality) and rate (how fast or slow you are talking).
When we speak about speech versus language, they are both a form of communication, but speech is a physical act whilst language refers to thinking and understanding and is a way we use words, sounds, or signs to share what we think and feel with each other.
Children develop speech sounds in their language in a predictable way, but with a large variance between children. For young children it is helpful to think about how well you can understand what they say as a whole, rather than sound by sound:
| Age | Percentage of what your child says, that you can understand |
| 19 – 24 months | 25 – 50% |
| 2 – 3 years | 50 – 75% |
| 4 – 5 years | 75-90% |
| 5 years up | 90 – 100 % |
Flahive & Lanza (2012)
So, between 2 and 3 years old, a person who doesn’t speak to your child regularly should be able to understand half of what they say. Between 4 and 5 years old most of what your child says should be understandable.
Below is a guideline for the age of development of consonant sounds in English, from McLeod and Crowe (2018), which can be found at www.speakingmylanguages.blogspot.com/2018/10/speech-acquisition-posters
If you are questioning your child’s pronunciation, it is a good idea to have their hearing tested by an audiologist, even if you think that they can hear. Hearing difficulties can be mild to severe, even a mild hearing loss can cause a difficulty in pronouncing certain speech sounds. This is because certain speech sounds happen at different frequencies (such as a low pitch or a high pitch) and loudness levels (like a whisper or a music concert). The diagram below shows how we hear different speech sounds in English at different pitches and loudness levels.
(https://www.njsha.org/pdfs/hearing-speech-banana)
If you are wondering if your child’s speech sound development is on track, you can book an appointment with a speech-language therapist who can assess your child’s skills further and guide you going forward.
References
McLeod, S., & Crowe, K. (2018). Children’s consonant acquisition in 27 languages: A cross-linguistic review. American journal of speech-language pathology, 27(4), 1546-1571.
Flahive, L. K., & Lanza, J. R. (2012). Guide to Communication Milestones.
