Speech Sound House
🏡 Welcome to the Speech Sound House: A Tour of Your Child’s Mouth in Action
By Sandlapper Therapy Group
Imagine your mouth is like a house. Sounds don’t just come from nowhere—they’re made in specific rooms, with tools that need power, air, and timing to work just right. For children learning to speak clearly, understanding how their “speech house” works helps make tricky sounds feel a little more playful and a lot more manageable.
Let’s take a tour through the house of speech, and along the way, we’ll link what we see to the fancy terms speech-language pathologists use when evaluating and treating speech sound delays and disorders.
🚪 Front Door Sounds (Front of the Mouth – Lips & Teeth)
This is where P, B, M, F, V, T, D, N come to play. These sounds are made at the front door—with lips (like /p/ and /b/) or the tip of the tongue near the teeth (/t/ and /d/).
🧠 In clinical terms, these are called:
Bilabials: lips together (/p, b, m/)
Labiodentals: lip and teeth (/f, v/)
Alveolars: tongue just behind teeth (/t, d, s, z, n, l/)
🚪 Back Door Sounds (Back of the Mouth – Tongue & Throat)
At the back of the house, sounds like /k/ and /g/ are made. These are the back door sounds—your tongue lifts way back to touch the soft part of the roof (called the velum).
🧠 These are known as:
Velars: made at the soft palate (/k, g, ŋ/ as in "sing")
🏠 Roof & Attic Sounds (Middle of the Mouth – Palate)
In the middle of the mouth, you’ll find /sh/, /ch/, /j/, and /r/—what we call roof sounds. These take some serious coordination and often develop later in childhood.
🧠 These are:
Palatals: tongue against the hard palate or just behind it (/ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ, r/)
🌬️The Power System: Voicing and Airflow
Now let’s talk about how we power our speech house. Some sounds need:
Sound: like a lawn mower that’s on (voiced sounds like /b, d, g/)
No sound: like a lawn mower turned off (voiceless sounds like /p, t, k/)
You can feel the difference if you put your hand on your throat while saying /z/ (buzzy) vs. /s/ (quiet). The vibration means it's voiced!
And all sounds need air, just like a fan. If the fan’s off, you can’t blow out the candles—same with speech. Too much or too little airflow can make a sound distorted or disappear.
🔧 How Sounds Are Made: The Manner of Articulation
Just like there are different tools in different rooms of the house, there are different ways sounds are made. Here’s the blueprint:
MannerDescriptionExample SoundsStopsAir stops briefly and then pops out/p, b, t, d, k, g/FricativesAir squeezes through a narrow space (like wind in a hallway)/f, v, s, z, h, ʃ, ʒ/AffricatesA stop plus a fricative (like a door creaking open)/tʃ, dʒ/NasalsAir goes through the nose/m, n, ŋ/LiquidsAir flows around the tongue/l, r/GlidesQuick movement of the tongue (like sliding down a banister)/w, j/
These three ingredients—place, manner, and voicing—help us describe every consonant sound in the English language. When a child is struggling with a certain sound or pattern, these features help us figure out why.
🧪 What the Research Says
Studies show that understanding these features helps speech-language pathologists diagnose and treat speech sound disorders more effectively (Bauman-Waengler, 2020). Children who have trouble with these building blocks may be diagnosed with an articulation disorder or a phonological process disorder—two different issues with different therapy approaches. As SLPs, we tailor therapy based on where in the house the breakdown happens.
Other important research includes:
Shriberg, L.D. & Kwiatkowski, J. (1982) on early phonological development and error patterns
ASHA’s Practice Portal on Speech Sound Disorders: https://www.asha.org/Practice-Portal/Clinical-Topics/
Hodson & Paden’s Cycles Approach for addressing patterns in speech intelligibility
🛠️ Helping Your Child Build Their Speech House
At Sandlapper Therapy Group, we help children renovate their speech house with confidence. Whether a child is working on opening their front door sounds or keeping the fan running steadily, we meet them where they are—with strategies that are playful, evidence-based, and designed to make real change.
So next time your child is playing with sounds, remember: they’re just learning how to be the architect of their own speech!