Dear Deanna,
My son receives weekly speech therapy for his articulation disorder. His speech therapist recently mentioned therapy goals targeting “oral-motor exercises.” What are oral-motor exercises and how can this help with my son’s articulation?
When it comes to therapy to remediate an articulation disorder, I like to draw a parallel between working out at the gym. Articulation therapy is centered around coordinating very specific muscle movements needed to accurately produce speech sounds. Similarly, working out at the gym involves training your body to move in a specific way. Both involve improving the strength and coordination of targeted muscles through a series of repetitive exercises.
For children experiencing an articulation disorder, there is often a deficit in the strength and coordination of the “articulators” (i.e. lips, tongue, jaw). Take, for example, children whose tongue doesn’t quite move posteriorly as it should, resulting in an “r” that sounds more like a “w”. It’s more than likely that simply “telling” these children to move their tongue farther back is not going fix the /r/, especially if the child has been saying “wabbit” instead of “rabbit” for quite some time. Their tongue has learned its own way of producing /r/ and the muscles and motor patterns of the articulators have adjusted accordingly. To reverse this pattern of error, your son’s speech therapist is giving your son the tools needed to correct his speech sounds. If she is noticing weakness in the musculature of his oral mechanism, then oral motor exercises may be in order.
It is important for speech pathologists to carefully consider the method in which oral motor exercises are administered. Many speech-language pathologists use non-speech oral motor treatments (NSOMT) to remediate articulation disorders. NSOMT refers to oral motor exercises completed apart from a speaking context. For example, a child might be asked to blow bubbles to facilitate lip-rounding for vowel production. However, there is insufficient research to verify that these types of exercises actually generalize to speech sound productions. There are differences in nervous system organization for speech acts versus non-speech acts (e.g. saying “ooo” versus blowing bubbles). Therefore, bubble-blowing may improve lip rounding for speech, or it may just improve lip rounding for bubble blowing. More evidence-based research is needed to verify the efficacy of NSOMT. Additionally, effective oral motor exercises should be implemented several times throughout the week in order to make sufficient gains. Research confirms that lifting weights in the gym only one time per week is not enough to improve muscle strength. Oral motor exercises are no different.
Speech is a multisensory and highly integrated act. When we produce speech sounds, several processes occur simultaneously: we are thinking about our idea, our voice “turns on” to generate sound, and our mouth moves to shape that sound into a word. Oral motor work is often warranted to increase the strength and coordination of the lips, tongue and jaw, however, oral motor work should be addressed in conjunction with speech sounds and integrated into a speaking context. Oral motor exercises may be an excellent route to helping your son’s speech sound errors. Ask your therapist to explain what exercises specifically she will be using to help your son. What will these exercises accomplish and what are the activities you can do at home to maintain progress?
This information was gathered from the article “What’s the Evidence For Oral Motor Therapy?” by Caroline Bowen (2005), the American Speech-Language and Hearing Association (www.asha.org) and from clinical experience. If you have any questions or concerns about this information please don’t hesitate to contact us at 847-329-8226 or email Dear Deanna.
