Jj is for Jottings 155.  Auditory Discrimination and Sound Errors.

When children make speech sound errors, we need to consider auditory discrimination and speech sound errors.  A child needs to be able to discriminate the difference between the correct sound and what they are saying instead.  Otherwise they don’t have much chance of replacing the error sound with the correct (target) sound.

WHAT IS AUDITORY DISCRIMINATION?

Auditory discrimination is the ability to hear the difference between one sound and another.  In this case, speech sounds.  The article on auditory discrimination of vowel sounds includes some principles that apply to all sounds, not just vowel sounds.  In particular is the inability to learn sound-letter links if they can’t discriminate between sounds.  And you need to make sure that the discrimination problems aren’t due to a hearing loss.

AUDITORY DISCRIMINATION COMES FIRST.

In the articles on the speech sound problems /s,z/ and /k,g/, I didn’t refer to auditory discrimination.  This was because the focus was on explaining the problems and giving tips on how to stimulate the sounds.  Sometimes that is enough for parents to be able to help the child learn the sound and apply it correctly.  Always worth a try.  But frequently that won’t be enough, and the child will need to see a speech pathologist to remediate the errors.  The first step is to check that the child is hearing/discriminating the difference between the error sound and the target.

Checking Auditory Discrimination.

Step 1

Check whether the child can hear the difference between the 2 single sounds.  If the target is /k/ and the child is saying /t/ as the error sound, say 2 sounds and ask whether they are the same or different.  (If the child is young, you may also need to be sure that they know what “same” and “different” are.)  The possible pairs are /t,t/; /t,k/; /k,t/; /k,k/.  If the child is correctly identifying whether all the variations are the same or different – good.  But it doesn’t end there.

Sometimes the child can hear the differences between the single sounds, but not when they are surrounded by other sounds.  This leads on to Step 2.

Step 2

Check whether the child can hear the difference between the 2 sounds in nonsense words.  You can find out all about nonsense words: what they are and how they are used for early reading, learning to rhyme and speech therapy.

In this case we are looking at just consonant and vowel combinations, since the target sound is a consonant.   Choose a vowel sound, and pair that with the combinations above.  Eg. Choose ‘ar’ (a nice, open neutral sound for starters), and the possible combinations are /tar,tar/; /tar,kar/; /kar,tar/; /kar,kar/.  When successful, choose a different vowel and repeat the exercise.  Change the order around, so you don’t end up with a pattern of same, different, different, same, as above.  Or any other pattern, for that matter.   Similar activities are described in vowel discrimination.

Go through this sequence with the consonant sounds at the beginning, then the end (/art, art/ etc.), then the middle (artar, artar/ etc.)

Step 3.

Hopefully you won’t need a Step 3, which would be to identify whether real words contain /t/ or /k/.  Since the children requiring these sorts of activities can be quite young, they often won’t know whether or not the words are real anyway.  If they were still having difficulty in discriminating between the two sounds at this stage, leave it to the speech pathologist to direct you.

DISCRIMINATING SOUNDS IN OTHER PEOPLE VERSUS SELF.

Bear in mind that it’s much easier to hear the differences between sounds when other people are saying them compared with listening to yourself.  This is an issue with all speech therapy.  If children can’t detect when they are making speech errors in conversation, they are unlikely to generalise their new, correct sounds into conversation and would constantly need to be reminded by others.  However, by this stage, the issue is not one of auditory discrimination, but lack of listening to themselves.  And therefore it does not come under the heading of auditory discrimination and sound errors!

 

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