Teaching Non-Stimulable Phonemes - How on earth?????

Eliciting sounds is the speech-language pathologist's special expertise! Don't let teaching non-stimulable, later-developing phonemes intimidate you. The task of eliciting sounds is actually much easier when using maximal contrast pairs because the differences between phonemes are much more apparent to the child. 

For my young clients, every phonology session begins with  "the Magic Wand," which is simply an inventory of all the consonants of English, reviewed in order to develop imitation of non-stimulable sounds in a low-stress activity. In this activity, the children practice each consonant of English in unison, in order from front to back (beginning with [m] and finishing with [h]) as the "leader" uses a "magic wand' to point to orthographic representations of each phoneme. The children are so successful with this activity that they remind me if I forget to start the session with it. A list of the phoneme orthographs in front-to-back order can be found here. It helps to have a mirror available for everyone to look in during this activity - it makes the cues given by the SLP more easily understood.

The beauty of the activity is that even a child whose speech is unintelligible produces many of the phonemes correctly in isolation, making her highly successful throughout most of the activity. In order to develop production of any non-stimulable phonemes during this broad activity, we pause at any phonemes any of the children may have difficulty with and give them some reminders. It is essential to have a group of cues for the difficult sounds ready in your mental toolbox. For example, for [ʃ] my cues are things like “make it noisy” or “make your lips round” (if it sounds too much like [s]),  “stretch it out” (if stopping consonants is the issue), etc. If the phoneme is one of the child's current targets, these cues are used again later in the session when working on contrast pairs, so the child knows which feature of the sound to focus on.

If, as a result of a cue for one feature of a phoneme, the child accomplishes correct production of the sound, fantastic! But if she simply latches onto the feature of the sound you are trying to develop (frication, continuance, etc.) at that time, that’s fine, too. The other features will be acquired as therapy progresses. The maximal contrast approach allows a single feature of the sound to be focused on, because that one feature is sufficient to differentiate it from its contrast in a maximal contrast pair, so the meaning of both words in the pair can be communicated. And conveying meaning is what it’s all about, especially for young children.

Eliciting [r] in young children

Most SLPs are reluctant select [r] as a target for a young child, because of its notorious difficulty even for older children. Think of it this way: your experience with older children has actually prepared you to teach the [r] sound to a young child. You already have numerous elicitation techniques in your toolbox. Happily, they work with young children too.

I usually begin [r] talking about tongue position, and a cue to "use your tongue, not your lips." First, I may cue the child to “tickle the top of your mouth with your tongue." The concept behind "tickle" is that, just like you don’t have to touch a ticklish person to make them laugh, your tongue doesn't touch the roof of your mouth to say [r]. When tongue position is relatively stable, I move to lip posture (usually a smile to increase tongue tension). If the child complies with whichever cue or feature you are targeting at the moment, you are being successful; it may not look like [r] on the sound spectrograph, but it's closer than the child's own production. Keep in mind that you wouldn’t expect a perfect [r] in conversation for every occurrence from a 3-year-old's preschool classmates, so it isn’t necessary that your 3-year-old client's [r] be perfected - just that it be different enough to be phonemic in the contrast pair, and, eventually, in conversational speech. More precise production will develop over time.