The Importance of Speech Assessments

A thorough speech assessment is an essential first step in understanding a child’s unique speech sound system and identifying what therapeutic supports are needed. 

A comprehensive approach makes sure that a clear, individualised plan with achievable goals can be created.

What is included in a robust speech assessment?

Some key elements that we might look at as part of a robust speech assessment include:

Oral Motor Assessment

An oral motor assessment evaluates a child’s oral motor skills, such as how their jaw, tongue, and lips move as they speak. The aim is to understand whether a child’s speech is impacted by their muscle coordination and strength or any structural elements. The Oral Motor assessment deck from Bjorem Speech is the perfect tool to add to your assessment toolkit to support this!

Single Sound Inventory 

A single sound inventory looks at the child’s ability to produce consonant and vowel sounds in isolation (i.e. by themselves). The Bjorem speech sound cues are a great resource to help you gather a full speech inventory. 

Phonology Assessment

A phonology assessment looks to examine if the child is presenting with any phonological error patterns in their speech and helps us to understand which phonological rules they might be struggling with (e.g. fronting, cluster reduction, gliding, stopping). 

Inconsistency Assessment 

An inconsistency assessment assesses if the child is able to produce a set of words, the same way, on multiple attempts of the same words. 

Connected Speech Sample

Connected speech relates to the way we speak in a continuous sentence. Words are often not pronounced in their entirety, leading to the deletion of certain sounds. For example, “I want to go” can sound like “I wanna go.’

Gathering a connected speech sample involves recording and analysing how a child’s speech sounds in conversation. This is done to ensure that error patterns aren’t missed during isolated sound or word tests. 

References

• https://www.ucc.ie/en/hrb-prosody/tasks/oromotor/ 
• https://www.pearsonassessments.com/content/dam/school/global/clinical/us/assets/deap/deap-technical-report.pdf
• https://www.rcslt.org/speech-and-language-therapy/clinical-information/speech-sound-disorders/