Speech assessment

A speech assessment is an assessment of speech sound production at single sound level as well as in different positions within a word. It is used by the speech and language therapist to determine what speech sounds your child can make, what errors your child is making in their speech production and their stimulability for different speech sounds. This assessment can be used for any child who is struggling to produce the correct sounds needed for intelligible speech.

Speech and language therapists can help children develop the correct speech sounds needed to produce a word correctly and in a way that can be understood by others. Using the information from the assessment our speech and language therapist will work with you and your child to create an individualised therapy programme that targets your child’s difficulties.

• dentification of phonological difficulties, delay or disorder.
• Identification of articulation disorder.
• Information from the assessment will help the speech and language therapist to create a unique therapy programme.

The speech assessment will help identify what sounds your child is struggling with, the information gained will help the speech and language therapist target the specific sounds through an individualised therapy programme.

Find out more…

• What will the speech assessment assess?
• Why is a speech assessment needed?
• Typical conditions that require a speech assessment
• What information will I receive following a speech assessment?
• Treatment following a speech assessment
• Summary

The speech and language therapist will use the speech assessment to gain information on what kind of speech difficulties your child is experiencing. Children can experience difficulty in producing certain sounds, or they may make errors when pronouncing words, such as replacing sounds with others, deleting sounds, or simplifying the word. The speech assessment will assess both individual speech sounds as well as sounds in words of different structures within connected speech. This will help to establish how your child’s speech difficulties are impacting your child and their communication and quality of life.

Children with speech difficulties are often hard to understand, their speech is not always clear and the mispronunciation of a word can make it difficult to determine what it is they are saying.

Children may struggle to physically produce individual speech sounds, this maybe because there are physical or physiological structures that make it difficult to produce the sounds. Or children may just be delayed in developing certain sounds. Sometimes children may have developed individual speech sounds but struggle to use these in words. A speech assessment will help to establish where the difficulty lies. A speech assessment helps to determine:

• Difficulty in production of speech sounds.
• Phonological delay.
• Phonological errors.

Information from the assessment will aid the speech and language therapists to create an individualised therapy programme that targets your child’s specific speech difficulties. Speech and language therapy can help increase your child’s correct production of words and help to make their speech more understandable to others. Speech and language therapy aims to increase your child’s overall communication skills as well as their speech.

Below are some of the common conditions the speech assessment is used for:

• Developmental delay
• Dysarthria
• Developmental verbal dyspraxia
• Cerebral palsy
• Cleft lip and palate
• Down's syndrome
• Stroke
• Acquired head / brain injury

Our speech and language therapist can help all children with a variety of conditions and difficulties, including those children who have not been diagnosed or identified with a condition. The speech assessment will help identify the individual speech sound difficulties your child is experiencing as well as the impact these difficulties are having on their communication. Our speech and language therapists can help improve speech difficulties by providing a therapy programme that targets each individual sound your child is struggling with.

After an assessment our speech and language therapist will provide a summary of the assessment and its results. Following an assessment you can request a report that details the findings of the assessment. The report will also contain information about how the difficulties, disorder or impairment is impacting on your child’s communication and daily activity. In addition to this the report will contain a treatment plan and recommendations on how to improve your child’s speech.

Some of the available speech and language therapy paediatric treatments are listed below:

• Specific speech sound intervention.
• Cued articulation.
• Core vocabulary.
• Maximal oppositions / minimal contrasts.
• Oro-motor exercises.
• Multi- sensory approach to therapy.

We offer a wide range of treatments, if you feel that your child could benefit from a certain therapy programme contact our speech and language therapist for more details. Email office@sltforkids.co.uk or call us on 0330 088 2298.

The speech assessment is used to identify difficulties with the production of speech sounds. The speech assessment is suitable for a range of conditions and can identify problems such as phonological errors or phonological delay.

Our speech assessments are used to assess and identify difficulties with speech in order to inform your treatment plan. If you would like more information on our assessments please email office@sltforkids.co.uk or call on 0330 088 2298.