“Joey”: A Premiere Speech and Hearing Success Story

Kristin Park, MS CCC-SLP

Over the next few months, our Speech blog will highlight some stories of patients who received therapy at Premiere Speech and Hearing. Names and identifiable information have been changed for privacy, but the success is real! This month’s success story is about a 4 year old boy, “Joey.” Joey’s parents sought speech services for him because they felt that he was difficult to understand and they often needed to interpret his utterances to unfamiliar listeners. This was causing him some frustration, too, since he had great language skills and a large vocabulary. Basically, he had a lot to say but was having trouble saying it! After a thorough evaluation, it was determined that Joey exhibited what are known as phonological processes, or specific sound error patterns that make his overall speech difficult to understand. Some of his error patterns included:

  1. Fronting, which is when sounds made in the back of the mouth (like K and G) are substituted with more frontal sounds (like T and D).
  2. Weak Syllable Deletion, which is when unstressed syllables are dropped (for example, “strawberry” becomes “straw-ree”).
  3. Final Consonant Deletion, which is when the ending sound of a word is dropped (for example, “hat” becomes “ha”).
  4. Assimilation, which is when most or all consonants in a word are reduced to a singular consonant (for example, “lemonade” becomes “meh-mo-may”)

Joey attended speech therapy sessions at Premiere once a week for 30 minutes, receiving one-on-one intervention with our SLP. Prior to COVID-19, Joey came into the office for therapy. When the pandemic hit, he began teletherapy services. Joey’s parents were worried about his attention and progress being affected by virtual services, but Joey surprised everyone and did great online! Speech teletherapy actually became the highlight of his week sometimes! After a year of weekly therapy, Joey had made significant progress in decreasing the use of those phonological processes. He learned specific speaking strategies to not only produce sounds in the correct oral placement, but also to produce all sounds and syllables in words. He practiced these strategies during games, craft-based activities, and even just plain old drill/repetition. By the time he was due for an annual re-evaluation, Joey had mastered his therapy goals and demonstrated age-appropriate speech skills! He completed 3 consultation sessions (one per month for three months) to ensure maintenance of skills and was officially discharged from speech therapy services after 15 months. Joey’s parents were thrilled with the progress he’d made in therapy. He was no longer frustrated when telling stories or talking to new listeners. Joey’s story isn’t unique – many children just like him have received speech therapy at Premiere and significantly improved their communication!