My Dream Job: Speech Pathology @lovingspeechpathlogy - Tumblr Blog

We all know college and grad school is expensive– that’s not news to any one. But being informed on how to relieve some of that debt is. Take a look at some of these organizations. They will pay for a certain amount (if not all!) of your tuition/forgive loans for service (i.e., working in an area that needs SLPs). It’s a good way to get a guaranteed job and lessen those financial burdens.

soyouwanttobeaspeechie

So speech therapy has some niche areas- including transgender voice therapy. Click on the link to find out more!

talkingmatters-blog

How do I help my 2 1/2 year old develop speech and language skills?

Two and a half year olds are learning to use words and phrases to express their developing independence. At times they may still rely on gestures and tone to add to their meaning and their pronounciation is still developing. They are copying lots of things from adults but are also able to combine words in new ways to say things they have not heard before. Here are some ideas to develop your child’s communication skills.

Two and a half year olds should be using hundreds of words and should be combining words into simple phrases of two to four words and beginning to use a few simple grammar structures such as “the, a, is and -ing”. They can follow simple instructions with a few key words and answer simple questions. Their speech should include a range of different speech sounds though they will still make many errors in the way they say things. Familiar people should understand much of what they say.

By 2 ½ years children can:

use more than 100 words

use many names of objects as well as action words (eat, sit, run) and describing words (hot, big, mine)

understand more than 300 words

follow simple instructions “put your shoes in your bag”

point to objects by function “what do we eat with”

point to most body parts

use language to greet people, ask for things, refuse things, make comments

understand what and where questions

combine two and three words together “my shoes” “want more drink”

use simple grammar words such as “the, a, is, on, in, -ing”

make eye contact when spoken to and respond to questions

To help your child develop language skills

1. Use modelling to fix up mistakes. Children at this age are experimenting with speech sounds and with how to combine words into simple sentences. You can help them fine tune these skills by repeating back what they say and fixing the mistakes “he shoes” yes those are “his shoes”, “my tat” yes that’s your “cat”. Use a positive tone and emphasis the changes slightly to draw your child’s attention to the correct form. Repeat it a few times for extra practice “he’s your cat, he’s a big cat, pat the cat”.

2. Expand what your child does say by adding another word. You can make a word into a phrase, or a phrase into a simple sentence by adding a word to it. You can also help your child develop describing words by adding them to what your child says. “look mummy, dog” Yes look at the big dog, a big, brown dog" Your child does not need to copy you. Just hearing what you say will help and they will use that new word when they are ready. If they do try to copy you though, respond positively.

3. Make use of activities around the house. Two year olds love to “help” and be involved in what you are doing. Make use of household jobs to teach your child new language skills.

Some ideas include:

Developing action words while cleaning: wash, wipe, scrub, spray

Learning big and little while sorting washing

Learning shapes and sizes while putting away the shopping

Learning describing words while preparing dinner, including tastes, textures, sounds and smells

Learning position words while tidying up, “put it in/on/under”

4. Provide opportunities for pretending. Use dolls, teddies, plastic food, cups, plates, and blankets for pretend feeding and sleeping. Use items from around the house such as bowls and spoons for pretending to cook. Use trucks, cars and blocks for pretend roads and traffic. Use plastic farm animals and fences, tractors and trucks. Sand and water play is also great for pretending. Toddlers also love dressing up. Pretending allows children to use language in different ways and to learn new words and concepts.

5. Provide opportunities to mix with other children. Two and a half year olds are developing an interest in other children but they still need adult help with sharing, taking turns, asking for and giving toys. Settings such as playgroups allow children to develop social skills in a fun, supportive setting and give mums support too. It also a great way to learn new play activities, rhymes and songs as well.

6. Expand your child’s interest in books. Toddlers who love simple, bright picture books are now ready to explore books with simple action stories such as “Spot” books and Pamela Allen books. Your librarian can help you with suitable books for your child’s age. Look for bright colours and simple stories of about one line to a page. Rhyme and repetition are great for this age to help toddlers learn to join in with the story.

Important tips for helping your toddler learn:

Get down to your child’s level, play face to face with lots of eye contact and expression.

Copy what your child does and add to it or expand it.

Repeat, repeat, repeat: Repeat words, activities, stories and songs.

Start where your child is and gradually move them forward. Start with the words you child can use and gradually add new ones. Start with toys and activities they can do and gradually add new ones. Start with books and songs they know and gradually add new ones.

Follow your child’s interests. Watch what they like, what they choose and what makes them light up. Use these things to help them learn.

Care for your child’s hearing. Follow up on ear infections and ask to see a specialist if your child has more than three ear infections in a year.

If you are concerned about your child’s communication a speech pathologist can help with an assessment, advice and ideas to help your child learn. For more information visit the Talking Matters Website.

Most of all have fun!

Talking Matters Team

talking with babies and toddlers

anatomyandphysiology101-deactiv

Brain injury is damage to the brain which is not hereditary, degenerative, or congenital. It is often caused by a physical trauma, such as a car crash, fall, or sports mishap. Other times the brain injury is acquired through medical conditions such as stroke or lack of oxygen. Here are ways brain injury can affect the body.

www.learninghumananatomy.com

ucsdhealthsciences-deactivated2

Mind Your Head

Most popular depictions of the exposed human brain present it from the side or perhaps top-down. This is the ventral view, a look at the bottom of the brain. Some of the elements are commonly seen from other angles, such as the brain’s iconic gyri and sulci, those meandering ridges and grooves that fundamentally increase the number of neurons that can be squeezed into a constrained space, i.e. your skull.

More notable from this perspective, though, is the stubby brainstem at the posterior part of the brain (back end) that connects to the spinal cord. It is the essential passageway for motor and sensory signals traveling between brain and body.

On either side of the brainstem is the striated cerebellum, Latin for “little brain,” which it vaguely resembles. The cerebellum plays an important role in motor control and is involved in some cognitive functions, such as attention and language.

Rarely but remarkably, persons are born with brains missing the cerebellum but learn to compensate due to the brain’s astounding ability to adapt, a concept called plasticity. That fact was recently highlighted in a pair of stories, local and national.

Muscles of mastication

#mastication

molothoo

gudetamari

These are more of the notes I was copying into my phonetics notebook last night. I really like this color mildliner. ✾꒡ .̮ ꒡✾ I thought my notes looked nice.

allthingslinguistic

Arika Okrent explains schwas on Lexicon Valley:

We all know that English spelling is rarely a good guide to pronunciation. One big reason for this is the prevalence of schwa in the spoken language. That’s why dictionaries and other written guides to pronunciation make use of a special symbol to represent the schwa sound. It looks like this: ǝ—an upside down e. But what is schwa anyway? Here are nine things to help you get to know this very important vowel.

1. ANY WRITTEN VOWEL CAN BE A SPOKEN SCHWA

A schwa is the ‘uh’ sound found in an unstressed syllable. For example, the first syllable in amazing (ǝ-MA-zing), the first syllable in tenacious (tǝ-NA-cious), the second syllable in replicate (RE-plǝ-cate), the second syllable in percolate (PER-cǝ-late), the first syllable in supply (sǝ –PLY), the first syllable in syringe (sǝ-RINGE). That’s a written A, E, I, O, U and even a Y coming out as schwa in the spoken version.

Schwas are very common in English (although they’re surprisingly difficult to play in IPA Scrabble, because they’re far more common in polysyllabic words). They’re less common in other languages, and are one of the things that contribute to non-native accents in both directions: English speakers tend to reduce vowels to schwa even when it’s unwarranted, and speakers of many other languages tend to pronounce too many full vowels.

Because of how common and distinctively-shaped schwa is, it (along with wugs) have become a ubiquitous icon for linguistics. For example, there’s a schwa necklace, dozens of schwa mugs and t-shirts, and of course the publication Schwa Fire.

kephas-rolling

Why does English still have the “TH” sound?

The interesting thing about this topic is that English is one of two languages of the Germanic family that has retained the feature commonly called the <TH>-sound which stands for the dental fricatives /θ ð/. If you have a look at the map below which highlights the Germanic tongues in red, only Icelandic and British English (from England, Wales, Scotland + Northern Ireland) in darker red sport these sounds. It is also fascinating because there was a time when the ancestors of all these tongues had dental fricatives but lost them over the last centuries.

Then, why did English maintain a sound that was lost in almost all its sister-languages despite centuries of evolution side-by-side?

Grimm’s Law

First, you have to understand that on the whole, Germanic languages phonetically stand out from the rest of the Indo-European languages for a set of processes that made original IE sounds move one step closer towards fricatives. These evolutions were named Grimm’s Law, after Jacob Grimm discovered this phenomenon in 1875. This is a brief summary of what happened during the splitting of Germanic away from common IE:

This translates into these instances:

Greek: Podos/ Latin: Pedis/ Sanskrit: Pada vs English: Foot/ Danish: Fod/ Gothic:Fotus.

Greek: Tritos/ Welsh: Trydydd/ Russian: Tretij vs English: Third/ Old Saxon: Thriddio/ Icelandic: Þriðji.

There are many more examples but the most relevant here is of course the change of alveolar/dental stops /t d/ into the dental fricatives /θ ð/. This is the first steps in explaining the presence of dental fricatives in English. They descend from a millennia-old process that saw these sounds develop in all Germanic languages.

Verner’s Law

When Grimm’s Law was accepted, a new problem arose; some words clearly didn’t fit within the frame hypothesised by Grimm. For example, Proto-Indo-European pa’tēr turned into father instead of the expected fader while PIE ‘brahtēr gave brother like Grimm’s Law predicted. The alternation can also be found in different forms of verbs. So of course, Grimm must have missed something. It turned out that the solution lies in the change of accents in Proto-Germanic. While stress was relatively free (meaning rather unpredictable) in PIE, PG stress shifted and was placed on the root of the word. The evolution of the phonemes did not affect the consonant if it was word-initial or right behind a stressed vowel. The evolution of these consonants are illustrated in the table below:

This is the reason why PIE /t/ became [θ] and then [ð] in PG for *fadēr while *brōþēr remained untouched. This event helped increase the number of instances of dental fricatives in Proto-Germanic. But it still doesn’t account for English dental fricatives. Be patient.

High German Consonant Shift

A new phenomenon took place in the southern dialects of German in the 5th century that consisted in a large-scale shift in the consonantal system. By the mid-5th century, Old English had already been brought to Britain and thus remained utterly unaffected by these changes whose relevant features are the following:

θ > d

β > b

ð > d

ɣ > g

As you can see, the dental fricatives evolved into stops and were consequently lost in the phonology. The HGCS was not restricted to German as certain elements can be found as well in Dutch, Low German and Scandinavian Germanic. Probably under the influence of German in the following centuries, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish lost their own dental fricatives as there were multiple and intense cultural and linguistic exchanges between German and “Scandinavian”.

While English, isolated geographically from the rest of Europe and from Germanic influence because of Roman and Norman Conquest, kept /θ ð/. It’s interesting to note that Britons did not have as much as Romans and Normans the inclination to write. Manuscripts by monks may have helped bring a certain standardisation to the language.

Two additional and contradictory phenomena took place in Middle English where /d/ changed to [ð] and /ð/ to [d]. This is why fader changed to father and murðer changed to murder. The sequence of /d/ + unstressed ending -er triggered its evolution to [ð].

In short, dental fricatives appeared in Proto-Germanic via Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law and Old English managed to maintain [θ] and [ð] because it left the continent before the effects of the High German Consonant Shift could be felt. Its geographical isolation (being on an island) certainly helped protect the relic of the Germanic legacy.

I saw once that Welsh may have had an influence on the upholding of these sounds since both languages had them. However, Latin and French were much more powerful influences on English but that did not impact the keeping of the dental fricatives so a foreign language influence is not really believable. However, French might have contributed to the phonemisation of [ð]. Before French came to Britain, /z v ð/ were only the voiced allophones of /s f θ/. By introducing new graphemes for sounds that were not “official” in English, it turned them into unquestionable elements of the phonology of English.

Isolation may be the biggest driving force on the upholding of these sounds since Icelandic, in a relative similar position, is the only other Germanic language with dental fricatives.

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My Dream Job: Speech Pathology