Interesting News About Speech Sound Acquisition

As I travel around giving workshops, I frequently hear collective sighs of frustration over how many children “qualify” for services using the Goldman-Fristoe-3. Last fall, I spent some quality time with the GF-3 standardization statistics, trying to develop a rubric for the developmental age for each speech sound. And then, in November 2018, McLeod and Crowe published Children’s Consonant Acquisition in 27 Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Review in AJSLP. Every speech-language pathologist serving young children should read this article. Their analysis draws conclusions very similar to what the GF-3 standardization population demonstrated: a large majority young children develop what we have thought of as “late-developing sounds” by the end of their 4th year of life. Take special note of the pyramid of speech sound learning for English on page 13 of the article.

Here’s a quick peek at their results:

75-85% of children in multiple studies acquired these consonants during their preschool years:

2 years: [m, n, j, p, w, d, b, f, k, g, ŋ]

3 years: [j, t, s, l, ʃ]

4 years: [ʧ, z, ɹ, Ʒ, ʤ. v]

5 years: [ð]

6 years: [Ɵ]

When you see that 75% of 4 year olds have acquired [ɹ] before age 5, it puts teaching more complex phonemes in a very different light.