Ming (Agents of Speech) explains that oral motor exercises can be useful as a stepping stone toward speech: whether they help depends on the specific speech target. Oral motor work breaks complex speech tasks into component oral-motor skills (e.g., tongue elevation for the /l/ sound), teaches easier non-speech oral targets first, and progresses stepwise toward producing speech sounds and words.
We want to talk about oral motor exercises. A lot of parents have been asking, do I need talk tools? Is this going to help? Are there any oral motor exercises that will help my child increase their speech ability? And their answer is, depends what you're working on. And how can we use oral motor exercises to help them with certain sounds, certain words and so on? Oral motor should be, and it is a stepping stone towards the ultimate goal, which is for your child to use sounds like speech sounds and words. We use oral motor because a child child cannot do a certain sound. And so we cut up all the skills and see, okay, how do our mouths move? For instance, if we're doing the L sounding, oh, we know that the tongue goes up. Therefore, we're going to teach tongue elevation. Teach them to elevate their tongue so that they can get the placement right. When we're breaking down these motions of our oral muscles, we can find easier oral targets that we can do without having a child to speak yet. So we're moving towards our goal step by step.
