Speech delays and reading

[LisaKinVA]

My youngest (now 6 1/2) has had some significant (for us anyhow) speech delays.  She began speech therapy 3 years ago. We have been working on phonics and it is *very* slow going.  I'm trying to figure out how much to push/expect.  She is also *very* bright.  So, the issue is, we practice reading a page, and she memorizes the patterns of the nonsense words.  We move onto the next page and she can't read the nonsense words she blew through on the previous page.

 

She struggles making tons of sounds, in every position.  I do know which ones say can say properly and insist she says those -- but I don't give her a lot of grief over the ones she can't (for example, I'm avoiding all words with "R" in them, because it's too frustrating AND I don't want to reinforce bad habits.  There are lots of sounds she can work on without that one.

 

There is no hearing issue.  There is no physical issue.  She plays reading eggs, but she memorizes the patterns, so it's really not going to work (other than a possible keep her busy kind of tool)

 

What are some things we can do to reinforce the phonics sounds?  Flashcards?

 

She's my youngest, my last, and my first with this severe of a speech issue.  I barely remember working with my 4 older children to help them learn to read.

[Rosie_0801]

Google for phonemic awareness activities.

 

I'd try drilling the syllabary using ElizabethB's lessons. I used them to work on pronunciation, introducing the sounds in the correct order (and I don't know what the correct order is for the US. Apparently it can be different for different dialects) with learning to read as kind of a bonus, lol. It got to the point where I was able to tell the difference between reading properly but mispronouncing and not reading it properly at all. That was handy. :p

 

I used magnetic letters. That little bit of tactile influence seemed to help a bit, kwim?

[PeterPan]

There are speech delays, meaning a developmental delay, things that improve with time, with maybe some nudging, and then there's apraxia.  And with what you're describing, I'd sure be wanting to know if that's apraxia.  Because most therapy is crap ineffective with apraxia.  You have to actually get in and work on the motor planning for apraxia, telling the brain when to lift the tongue, how to retract the lips, etc.  PROMPT is the therapy for that.  Imitation-based therapies often don't work for apraxia, because it's a motor planning problem.

 

So that's thing one to look into.

 

Thing two is she's probably dyslexic.  Or rather, at this point her issues are so severe you might as well assume she is.  And with my dyslexia, lots of labels, ds with apraxia, I used LIPS and am now in Barton.  LIPS, when combined with PROMPT, is EXTREMELY powerful.  Thing is, and I'll just be straight, with my ds his phonemic awareness, as in ability to hear the sounds and distinguish them, was directly connected to his speech.  So, while it's nice to think you can get the phonemic awareness going without the speech, it might be the speech issues hold it back.  That's why I went into the thing about PROMPT, because it can be dramatically more effective than imitation-based therapies and it is a tool you can carry over at home and use together with LIPS to get her reading.

 

Oh no, they made private on youtube my FAVORITE video on PROMPT!!  I'm so disgusted.  Well anyways, PROMPT involves neuromuscular inputs for each sound and the motor planning.  So as the therapist teaches them to you, it's easy to pair them with the faces in LIPS.  So then you go through this gradual building process of saying this is how the sound *feels*, this is what it *looks* like (hold up mirror), this is the *face card* that we can manipulate, this is *letter* of the alphabet (use letter magnets) that we does it when voiced (using the PROMPT for voicing), and this is his *voiceless brother*...  So we pair them and get through all the steps.  It's rocket science.  Like literally, honestly it really was rocket science for my ds.  But once we got through that, things were MUCH easier.

 

https://bartonreading.com/students/#ss Here's the Barton pretest, where you can see if she needs LIPS.

 

http://promptinstitute.com/index.php?page=find-a-prompt-slp Here's the PROMPT site where you can search for providers.  I see there are some in Italy, so you have options.  With my ds, there was no confusion about whether I was in the right technique.  We went, and the very first session things changed.  He went in not speaking and literally SPOKE the first day!  They could literally lay their hands on him, do the PROMPTs, and he could hit the targets.  That's the difference between a delay (things behind, slow to come) and no language delay, yes communicative intent, but no ability to *motor plan* and make it happen.  So it was immediately obvious we were in the right therapy.  I drove 2 1/2 hours each way weekly, ran out of money, went to every other week, etc.  She moved a little closer to us, so now we only drive 2 hours each way.  Weekly.  Because it's THAT amazing.

 

I'm not a speech therapist, but I watch things.  I know someone who got told it was apraxia, and BAM that speech just came in, clear as a whistle, just a year or two later.  That was a delay.  The therapist was not an apraxia expert, and she misdiagnosed a delay as apraxia.  But then there's this inverse situation, where it's not coming in, and when it comes in it's straggling, speech is not clear, motor planning is not right, basics are not happening (rounding, tongue lifting, etc.) or the speech is *really really* fast trying to cover the motor planning weaknesses, etc.  That's apraxia.  And maybe it's not always that tidy; I'm not an expert.  I'm just saying question your diagnosis to see if you're getting optimal care.  The first SLP I took ds to said she would diagnose apraxia more in hindsight, like oh the therapy didn't work and his speech is crap so it's apraxia.  The apraxia expert (next SLP), says the patterns of the motor planning and the motor planning problems are obvious and demonstrable, I don't have to wait for him to fail to say it is.  So someone can be a nice person, a good therapist, but maybe have a different philosophy or level of experience and not catch it.  So when you call a PROMPT therapist, you can talk it through with them, see what they say, and let them sort it out.  They can do an eval and tell you whether it's motor planning or a delay, because they really are treated differently.

 

I don't know that I would have been able to get my ds reading without that combo of the LIPS and PROMPT.  He needed to FEEL the sounds and have it all slowed down and isolated.  He's doing really well now, btw.  Well except for minor details like comprehension, which we think is connected to his ASD and not so much the dyslexia.  Is anything else on the table for your dd for labels?

 

[RKWAcademy]

My 6 year old son has apraxia and has been in speech therapy for almost 4 years.  He's doing well with AAR.  His therapist is not exactly a fan of homeschooling but she does answer my questions about reading problems.  Have you tried talking to her therapist?  My son has trouble with r still, including blends.  R and R blends are too common to skip in reading.  At first, I let my son say "r" however he was going to say it.  Now that he is working on r in speech, I make him say r words correctly.  The pp who mentioned tongue placement is correct.  Those r sounds aren't going to happen without training on tongue placement.  In the beginning it was a big smile as he says r and I think the therapist physically showed him in his own mouth where his tongue must be placed.  It's work.  I wish you luck.

[Tiramisu]

Even if hearing is fine, there can be an auditory processing problem. That could be a cause of speech and reading problems but also just part of a bigger picture. She's on the young side for testing.

[Crimson Wife]

A speech delay can make reading difficult in a couple of distinct ways, and it depends on whether it is a primarily a phonological processing issue or a language issue.

 

Some kids have difficulties with processing the individual sounds that make up a word. They typically struggle with rhyming, identifying the first sound (onset) in a word, and so on. These kids often have articulation disorders or apraxia. This is dyslexia.

 

Other kids have difficulties with learning vocabulary, word retrieval, answering basic wh- questions about information they hear, etc. They may have intact phonological processing but still struggle with reading because of the language impairment.

 

Here's an example to illustrate the difference: my daughter could easily read the words "cup" and "cat" but struggled to read the word "cap". She eventually did it but it was painfully slow even though she could quickly sound out the individual phonemes. The problem was that she didn't have the word "cap" in her vocabulary so it was like a nonsense word. From a phonetic standpoint, all 3 words are equally easy to read.

 

Ask your SLP to run a test of phonologicaly processing like a CTOPP to see if your child has phonological processing difficulties.

[OneStepAtATime]

What everyone else said.  Look into auditory processing issues, apraxia, dyslexia, etc.  Flash cards aren't the answer, IMHO.  Hugs and good luck.

[PeterPan]

Crimson, is it possible your dd was memorizing the words and not sounding them out, hence her inability to read the non-sense word?  My ds has no issue with non-sense words, but Barton uses them all the way, in every lesson, both decoding and encoding nonsense words and using them for sound identification warm-ups.  If he doesn't know a word (paddock, keg, whatever), he still reads it.  At that point an unknown word might as well be nonsense, but he can still decode it.  He just doesn't know what he read, lol.  And since he doesn't remember things he's told once (needs LOTS of repetition), I got asked "Mom, what is a keg?" a lot.   :lol: 

 

 

[PeterPan]

On the auditory, I took my ds at newly 6 to an audiologist at the university to get him checked with as much as they would check at that age.  Then ran a full normal eval and then *some* of the screening stuff for CAPD.  He had failed half the APD screening the SLP ran, but he was ok according to the audiologist.  Now granted, when he hits 7 we could go back and get the full screening run to be sure.  You're so close, you could start that process.  It was just odd because half the APD screening with the SLP was stuff you would fail as a dyslexic.  Complicated stuff, sigh.  I will say we had so many unanswered questions with my dd, I took her in.  If you can get access to good testing, it's always good.  Dd's was borderline and nuanced, just one one area, not enough to get her a diagnosis but enough to cause her issues.

[Crimson Wife]

Crimson, is it possible your dd was memorizing the words and not sounding them out, hence her inability to read the non-sense word?  My ds has no issue with non-sense words, but Barton uses them all the way, in every lesson, both decoding and encoding nonsense words and using them for sound identification warm-ups.  If he doesn't know a word (paddock, keg, whatever), he still reads it.  At that point an unknown word might as well be nonsense, but he can still decode it.  He just doesn't know what he read, lol.  And since he doesn't remember things he's told once (needs LOTS of repetition), I got asked "Mom, what is a keg?" a lot.   :lol: 

 

She was sounding the familiar words out and then blending them back together smoothly as would be typical at 6.5. The unfamiliar word she was sounding out but then got stuck just saying kuh-AP until eventually with a ton of prompting blended it.

[PeterPan]

Maybe more practice with nonsense words to get comfortable with the concept?