Down syndrome - articulation test 3

Articulation evaluation - 5 years.

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 third report. You may also want to see the previous two reports here and here.
 

The STUDENT was re-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 82 (14%ile rank) indicates that his speech sound skills remain below normal limits in single words, but significant improvement was observed

Discussion of test and re-test comparison:

• The STUDENT continues to produce speech-sound patterns that are typical for his developmental age include gliding (W/R, Y/L), as well as, D for voiced TH and F for voiceless TH.
• He has improved in his ability to produce SH, CH and J, nearly resolving the patterns of palatal fronting and deaffrication.
• The STUDENT has made progress with consonant blend reduction as he mostly produces consonant blend simplification which is more typical for his age (W for R-blends); most of the L-blends are produced accurately except for FL ("plowers"/flowers), and W for L in GL and KL ("gwasses"/glasses and "kwown"/clown).
• He no longer uses fronting (N/NG) or stopping (D/S).
• The STUDENT no longer omits sounds (his previous omissions included- F (kni/knife), TH (umb/thumb).
• He used to produce sounds that were unusual as in M/GL (masses/glasses), S/DR (sum/drum), Z/SW(zimmin/swimming), and this was not observed today.
• Assimilation within words and across words had less of an influence on the variability of his sound production. A typical example of assimilation from last year was "guk"/duck and "giga"/finger. This year, the only example of assimilation was "shishing"/fishing.
• The STUDENT continues to distort S and Z and other tongue tip sounds due to exaggerated forward tongue movement.
• Testing today included story retelling included in the GFTA-2; The STUDENT spontaneously produced single words and some phrases to describe the pictures and actions.
• The STUDENT was able to name all items on this test accurately and immediately; overall, his mother reported that The STUDENT's vocabulary is impressive.

In summary, The STUDENT has made good progress over the past few months, and his speech progress has outpaced what would have been expected from developmental progression of sound system development. This is especially in evidence when considering that he made changes from atypical (disordered) sound production to more developmental (delayed) pattern.

It is recommended that The STUDENT continue therapy to address speech sound practice within expanding utterance length. Mother reported that The STUDENT may benefit from cueing from reading and sign language.