Speech Therapy

Ella has been receiving speech therapy for almost a year now.  We had her evaluated at about 20 months old when she didn't say a single word.  I mean, nothing.  No babbling, no gibberish, no repetitive sounds (like dadada, gagaga, or lalala etc).  She basically played in silence, even when spoken to.  At first we wondered if it might be some sort of hearing issue, but she did turn her head when called, and was able to follow age-appropriate directions, so we ruled out hearing loss.  When she was officially evaluated by the Early Intervention people, they diagnosed her with a severe speech delay- at about the level of a 7-month old.  She began receiving services shortly thereafter.

Her first therapist was Talia.  She was great- she'd get right down on the floor with Ella and got her to open up and really begin experimenting with sounds.  After working with Ella for about 7 months, she moved to a different agency.

Now we are with Marcella, who is actually from Colombia so has an accent when she speaks English.  But Ella can understand her most of the time, and Marci really knows her stuff (she's been doing this for 20+ years).  Here are a couple of videos from a recent session.  As you can see, Ella has come leaps and bounds!  She is definitely a little chatterbox now.

She still makes many mistakes when speaking, but many of them follow the same articulation patterns that other children her age use (aka phonological processes).  She doesn't terminate many of her words, and she doesn't say the /k/ sound at the beginning of a word- she'll say it as a /t/ sound instead (i.e "tat" instead of "cat" or "tandy" instead of "candy").  She also completely eliminates the /g/ and j as in "jam" sounds.  She just won't say them at all in any word position.  So "angel" sounds more like "anel".  And /g/ is replaced with /d/- "doe" instead of "go". 

In this video, the purpose of the activity was to get Ella to say "out" with an emphasis on the final /t/ sound on the end.  We have been overexaggerating our pronunciation of /t/ and also using some visual clues like closing our hands next to our mouths to demonstrate that your mouth closes at the end of a word.  Ella mimics the hand gesture well, which is a sign that she is understanding the concept- and since this video was taken she has actually begun to end /t/ words correctly and distinctly more often.