Oral Motor Exercises for Speech Clarity

Hey, this is Ming here, a speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com today we're talking about whether oral motor exercises help for speech clarity. Okay, so first things first, let's talk about what speech clarity, let's define it, right? So speech clarity. More specifically, we call it speech intelligibility. This is a percentage, meaning after a speech therapist like myself, we go through like articulation test and see whatever patterns there are. We also come up with a number, which is the intelligibility of the child, which means how much do I understand the kid? Okay. Given that it's just an impression, okay. Sometimes we do it more systematically with numbers and what have you, but usually it's an impression based number. Okay. And children should reach around 90 to 100% speech intelligibility by the age of five, meaning they're pretty much like adults when they're talking. Okay. And it's within, still within normal limits, which it means it's okay for children of around below 3, like 2 to 3, sometimes 4 years old to have a lower percentage of speech intelligibility. Okay, so what factors affect speech intelligibility? So a lot of people will think, oh, it must be coordination or motor movement and so on, so forth, right? Because there's a lot of therapy out there who, who just do like talk tools, if you know what I'm talking about, then you must have tried it before, right? And what this is is that it's a rather misconception because most of the speech intelligibility, like the clarity, so to speak, if it's low, the factor is mostly because of language abilities like their linguistic understanding of the sounds of our language. Okay. And you can see this as a child can say a word by itself, but when they put it in a sentence, it becomes jumbled up and they kind of like, like that. It's because the longer and more syllables there are, the harder it is for them to decode and understand the sounds inside. Okay, So a very good example is like if you see videos online that are like the Tiktoks nowadays, the Instagram, Instagram reels that I talk about. Oh, can a child say ambulance, right? Or dinosaur or caterpillar? Like one syllable, one by one syllable. But when you say, say caterpillar like that, right? So they're, they're basically word by word defined. But then when they put it together, the linguistic context becomes much more complex. It's harder for them. So that's why it's actually a linguistic and language problem more than a Coordination problem. Well, obviously, coordination is also part of it. And as we go grow from, like, child to adult, our coordination becomes better, and then it becomes worse when we're older. Right. So what I mean is speech is very intricate. Right? So we require a lot of coordination in order to speak and that we call. Call coarticulation. All right? So coarticulation is when I or you go. When we speak, we go from a sound to another sound. Might be from a consonant to a vowel or a vowel to a vowel. So from a vowel to vowel is much easier. Like, it's basically the easiest thing you can do when you put two sounds together. If it's two vowels, like I, I. Right. Or O, like the letter O. Right. So it's easier like that. And then the next step would be like a consonant to a vowel, which might be like ma. So. So. And the last. The hardest one is to, like, put two consonants together. For instance, it's a blend of consonants. For instance, if it's sk, then sk. Right. So that's why blends are much. Kids tend to develop those sounds at a much older age just because it's harder in terms of coordination to do so. And yeah, the last part is that your child. The factor is that your child might have a speech sound disorder. Okay. And you will only know this if you go to a speech therapist, like a. Like someone like myself to do a articulation test. It doesn't need to be me, so don't ask me whether I can do it for you over the Internet or not. Go to a local speech therapist if you can, and get that articulation test done. Okay. And generally speaking, there are loads of speech patterns, erroneous ones, like the ones that are wrong, but there are a few that will determine whether your child is disordered or just a delay and delay, meaning that they may catch up. Okay, I may. I'm using the word may. Okay. I'm not entirely sure unless I see your kid. Okay. And obviously, yes, there's loads more factors that surrounding the speech clarity, intelligibility kind of thing. There's like, for instance, the structure issues. Some children have an open, like, open bite. They have a hole right here. Some children might have a cleft palate. They have structural issues going on. Of course, it. It also affects speech clarity. But we're not talking about this here, right? Right now, if you guys are interested, I'll make video more about the factors. But I'm just telling you in this video where we're talking about motor, oral, motor Exercises. That's the. That's something you need to understand. Okay, so first of all, about oral motor exercises and massages. How does it impact me right now? We have. We don't really have much of an evidence that ome, as we call it, oral motor exercises actually help with, like, speech clarity and speech development, so to speak. Okay. I've seen many times that children who cannot perform very simple oral motor exercises, such as putting, like, what we call tongue lateralization, like just wagging a tongue left and right, but they can speak pretty well. Okay. I've also seen children who cannot stick their tongue out voluntarily. They can also speak pretty. Okay, all right. Not. Not saying 100 intelligibility, but, you know, like, good enough for me to understand. So is there a link there? There is, but we. We don't really have a evidence that, say, this is for sure. This helps 100%. Okay. So. But the problem is. You're going to ask me, dude. A lot of people are doing om with children, especially with talk tools, you know, like, blowing stuff, sucking stuff, you know, biting stuff, chewing stuff. Is. Is that all just, you know, just a myth? Like. Like, are they just taking your money for no reason? Well, you don't know about that. It's not really like that. Why do we do ome basically is because of two reasons. Number one is if your child can't do the speech sounds, it's a step down. It's a. It's something that's easier for the child to achieve rather than always trying to get them to say the sound. Okay. For instance, if you want the child to say the L sound like the first thing, developmentally speaking, the child needs to know how to put the tongue left and right first. That's why you're doing. There's no speech sound out there. Literally. There's none that require your tongue to go left and right other than just to tease something someone. Right. There literally isn't a sound that requires you to do that. Okay. So why we do it is because as the tongue coordinates better, it goes left and right, and then it learns how to go up and down. And then we only need the up for the L. Right. And maybe to release it down when you say la like that. Right. So we need to teach it from ground up, and it's like a step down. Right. So we do use it for, like, particular reasons. Okay. The second reason is to teach the placement where you put the articulators, meaning the jaw, lip, and the tongue. So, like, the muscles, the structures where you put it in order to make the sound. So using the L sound, again, if you're using a lot of talk tools or the methods that. The techniques that you talk about, which is not very readily available for most parents, because even like a professional myself, I have to go through like training of level 1, 2, 3, whatever, and it takes like 2000 USD to go through that. And you know, I've, I've paid for it, but I'm, I'm okay with it. I think I've learned quite a bit from it, but obviously it's not going to be the whole thing. Like, it's not. I learned talk tools. I know how to use like straws and whatnot. And then your child's going to be able to speak. It's not like that. Right. So at the end of the day, if you use one of the techniques, which is like to elevate the tongue to the top of the roof of the mouth and right, the, the hard palate, what we call. Yeah, the hard palate. Right. The alveolar ridge is the word right above it, right behind the front teeth. Put a tongue there and hold it there. All we got to do is just to vocalize to make the L sound. Right. If you put it up. But obviously sometimes it doesn't go that easily because I've seen many times that the tongue goes up and I try to vocalize, it becomes ah, like this, ah, like that. You know what I'm saying? So it's rather, it's like a catch 22. You don't know whether if it's helping, helpful or not. And if when it does, it's like, oh, is it because I did this? Or motor exercise? So it's all part of everything. And you have to try everything when your child cannot do a certain sound, you know. So how about massaging? So massaging has a little bit more of a research backing about positive results from like speech clarity and does it help and so on. Right. So massage, I think I myself, I haven't taken any courses or learned from other like therapists about how to do these kind of stuff. But I do see that it helps with the sensory. Okay. And sensory and motor are like two things that work together. So sensory motor is what we usually say. So why do we say sensory motor, not motor? Sensory is because sensory comes before motor. If you can't feel it, how do you move? Right. And you've seen it, you tried it before, right? If you've been to the dentist and you had some painkillers going on and then when it kicks in, you start drooling, you start, you. You can't talk anymore properly. You go like. It's because you know you're numbed out and you can't feel your articulators. That's why you can't move. Okay. And therefore it's going to be really hard for you. Like, if you ever had, like a numb arm, like, not enough blood, the first thing you can move, right? And once you can move, it feels funny when, when the blood starts to circulate back because you can. You cannot feel any, but you can move it. So it's not very. How to say it's not. Your fingers and your hands aren't very accurate, so to speak. So it's the same with, like, massaging. Does massaging help with sensory things or just warming up the muscles and so on? Of course it does. You know, that's why we do it in sports and do it in a lot of different things. Especially if a person has been through a stroke and they have low muscle tone or really high muscle tone, really tense, the massaging does really work. Okay, so does. Does it help with speech therapy for children? I think so. But at the same time, do not get obsessed about oral motor exercises and massaging, because the only thing that will help your child increase speech clarity or intelligibility or to correct the speech errors is to practice the speech sounds themselves. Okay? Because all you can do is, like, watching someone or, you know, you can practice squatting all you want, but at the end of the day, if you don't try to dunk a basketball, you won't dunk it. Okay? That. That's just a analogy of such, Right? So therefore don't get obsessed with that. These are tools to help your child go towards the correct speech sounds. And then when they get it, they can keep on trying to. They can keep on getting like. It will help them get closer and closer and closer to the correct sound. And then you can add more linguistic context to help them out and generalize towards conversations. Okay? And that's why I created a free template for teaching speech sound disorders. And you can download it at agents of speech.com speech you will download PDF and also have a video outlining how to. Outlining how to use it. Okay? So that's the end of this video. I hope to see you next week. Bye. Bye.