When we work with kids who can only say a few speech sounds, one of our first goals is often to increase the number of different sounds they can hear and say. For many children – especially young ones – this can be tricky because you can’t see or touch sounds. This makes it hard for kids to contrast similar sounds, e.g. to distinguish short “stop” sounds like /k/ from /t/, or hissy “fricative” sounds like /s/ from /f/.

To help kids tell different speech sounds apart, and to encourage them to give new sounds a go, we use these simple pictures in our clinic to represent speech sounds. We base this approach on the wonderful work of researchers like Adele Miccio and Mary Elbert.