Some children have unclear speech which can make it hard for them to communicate at home, at nursery/school or with their friends.
Children may:
- Find it difficult to make certain sounds. For example, when they try to say ‘k’, a ‘t’ sound may come out, or when they say a ‘s’, it may sound lispy/hissy.
- Substitute/swap sounds in their talking. For example, some children may use a ‘t’ instead of an ‘s’, saying “tun” instead of ‘sun’ or they may swap ‘g’ with ‘d’, saying “gag” instead of ‘dad’.
- Delete sounds instead of using them. For example, they may not say the consonants at the start or at the ends of their words. They may say “-at” or “ca-“ for ‘cat’.
Children develop their speech sounds at different rates, but most children have learnt and can use all speech sounds by the time they are 7 years of age. As a general rule, by 4 years of age, children’s speech should be intelligible to unfamiliar adults, even if they do have some persisting speech errors.
To support children who have unclear speech, you can try these activities:
- Talk about sounds in your everyday environment with your child, for example, you could say, “The sun is shining today. Sun starts with a ‘s’. ssssun”
- Correctly repeat back any words to the child so that they hear the correct pronunciation.
- Play games with sounds, for example ‘I spy’.
- Read rhyming books or listen to rhyming songs.
- Clap along to the syllables for things that they find exciting or motivating, for example ‘It’s Mario! Let’s clap along to Mario- Ma-ri-o! 3 claps!’
