Down syndrome - articulation test 1

Articulation evaluation - 4 years old.

In addition to the speech therapy offered by the public school, my son also gets private speech therapy once a week for 30 minutes. We started when he was 2 years old. These sessions focus exclusively on articulation and intelligibility.

Here is the first report. A six month follow-up is available here.

The STUDENT was administered the Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation-2nd Edition (GFTA-2) to assess his production of speech sounds in single words. Standard scores between 85-115 are considered within normal limits for age. The STUDENT's standard score of 78 (10%ile rank) indicates that his speech sound skills are below normal limits in single words.

The STUDENT's speech intelligibility in single words and connected speech is reduced. This clinician understands him about 50% of the time when the context is shared. It was notable that many of his word approximations seemed to vary with his repeated attempts.

The STUDENT's speech-sound development reflects some age typical differences and some atypical differences. The STUDENT's speech-sound patterns that are typical for his developmental age include gliding (W/R, Y/L), palatal fronting (S for SH, TS/CH, D/J), deaffrication (TS/CH, D/J), consonant blend reduction (T/ST, S/SL, K/KR, G/GR, W/FR, B/BR, F/FL, T/TR, P/SP, P/PL), fronting (N/NG), stopping (D/S) and D for voiced TH and F for voiceless TH. Some of his speech-sound differences were atypical, such as, M/V in vacuum, H/F (telephone), omit F (kni/knife), omit TH (umb/thumb), M/GL (masses/glasses), S/DR (sum/drum), Z/SW(zimmin/swimming), omit syllables ("mena"/banana).

Assimilation within words and across words appeared to be an influence on the variability of his sound production. A typical example of assimilation is "guk"/duck and "giga"/finger. Yet, he said "macuum"/vacuum as an example of within-word atypical assimilation and "gis" for this and "mencil" for pencil, which might have been a between-words assimilation.

Imitation sometimes helped his accuracy of word production. He uses techniques learned in speech therapy sessions, such as some touch cues and exaggerated oral movements.
It is recommended The STUDENT's speech and language therapy continue to address speech intelligibility difficulties. In addition to working on F and V, therapy goals should address word production consistency, multisyllable words (include all syllables in 3 syllable words), and some early developing blends (KW, and L-blends).