Greetings Fellow SLPs!
No matter your speech therapy approach, adding essential production components beyond place-manner-voice to your therapy options can be super helpful for generating good speech sounds.
If you think about it, all speech sound productions are based on the principle of stabilization-mobilization. Selected parts of the tongue, lips, and jaw stabilize, and selected parts mobilize. And that’s just the beginning.
In this blog post, we’ll investigate these therapeutically beneficial components and throw in some therapy techniques. But first, to get a sense of speech stabilization-mobilization, consider doing the following task:
This side tongue-to-teeth contact is called “Bracing” (Gick et al., 2013, 2017), or sometimes the lingual anchorage is referred to as “lateral margin stabilization.”
Do you address this important lingual stabilization component in your speech therapy?
Do you think it would be important to do so? Absolutely! It’s a critical piece for controlling lingual movements. Period.
A Deeper Dive into Lingual Control
Speech movements are small; they must be small to “fit” into coarticulated speech. Rapid oral movements during connected speech production require smaller, more refined articulator movements. Think about the necessity of anchoring the edge of your hand during handwriting. Imagine trying to write quickly and legibly without it.
Here’s a good quote to remember and apply: To generate refined small movements (and we know the speech is small), one must acquire stabilization NEAR the moving part. This applies to handwriting and speaking.
In other words, biting teeth together (like some of our young clients do) is not “close enough” to the moving part to provide ample lingual control. Side-tongue bracing (of which there are varying degrees of tongue-to-teeth anchorage) enables controlled tongue movements to produce speech sounds.
Front-tongue productions—n, t, d, s, z, sh, zh, ch, j, and l—require the front tongue to move vertically and interact with the alveolar ridge and/or part of the hard palate. Therefore, lingual contact with the top, side teeth, and the perimeter of the palate BRACES (anchors and supports) front-tongue movements for plosives as well as sustained elevated lingual positions for fricatives and affricates. Back-tongue productions—k, g, ng, r—also require anchorage.
Ever work with any of those speech sounds? Oh, yeah! As you’ve figured out by now, lingual stabilization is a NECESSITY for lingual movement control for almost all speech sound productions. Even front and back high-vowels require lingual lateral bracing; low-vowels, not so much. As far as other lingual consonants, the “th” requires minimal side-tongue stabilization.
“Bracing” is the tongue’s EXTERNAL form of stabilization. However, there is another exceedingly important form of lingual stabilization that also aids in speech movement and clarity: INTERNAL stabilization, e.g., muscle tension (especially needed for th, l, and r) and mid-tongue contraction needed for front-tongue vertical speech sounds. Amazingly, this knowledge has been around since 1985 (Kier & Smith). We’ll cover INTERNAL stabilization in a later blog post.
Rationale
By now, you may be wondering why all the fuss about lateral lingual bracing. Following are several reasons why it’s imperative to increase control and, ultimately, intelligibility. Lingual lateral bracing:
Fundamentally, bracing helps the tongue “keep its place” as it deftly moves from placement to placement. There are a lot of advantages! Does this make sense to you?
And finally….
Two “Stabilization” Tasks
Through the years, I’ve attended terrific seminars and vowed to incorporate the “NEW” strategies into my therapy. Sometimes, I did. But honestly, most of the time, I didn’t. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I did not deliberately take the time to do it and then consciously keep doing it. (I do have regrets!)
“NEW” techniques take intentional effort, long-term dedication (as in weeks+), and ongoing client observations to determine if they’re working or not.
The following are two Stabilization techniques. Give one or both a go! Select one, and try it with several clients over time, during several therapy sessions, and see what happens. Stay with it. I would love to hear what you think about this basic technique and any questions you may have.
Side-Stroke-Match: With an oral therapy tool (small tongue depressor, Ark Probe, Z-Vibe, Nuk Brush), stroke the sides of the tongue and the sides of the teeth (back to front), and match the stroked areas together. Take a moment for the client to focus, find, and feel the contact and positioning of the tongue-sides on the top and side teeth. Sometimes, it helps them to close their eyes. Do several times so they begin to discern tongue elevation within the upper dental arch and notice the tongue-to-teeth contact.
Here's another therapy technique to enhance lingual-dental bracing awareness and positioning. I’ve used this one most often with adults.
This one is called Bite-Slide: With the tongue spread between the side teeth, bite gently on the sides of the tongue. Then, as you close your jaw and bite teeth together, slowly and deliberately slide the tongue-sides up the side teeth to the palate. Call attention to the lingua-dental contact.
It helps if the client has acquired a good tongue resting posture up within the dental arch. An established elevated tongue position helps them more easily acclimate to tongue elevation and lateralized dental targets up within the dental arch. A good resting posture is not a deal-breaker, but it certainly helps. We’ll cover the oral resting posture in a subsequent blog post.
Until then, thank you for all you do for your therapy clients!
Char
Char Boshart, M.A., CCC-SLP
Speech-Language Pathologist
SpeechDynamics.com
Boshart, C. (2022). Speaking Tongues are Actively Braced. Speech Dynamics, Inc. Therapy Matters Blog link: https://speechdynamics.com/blogs/chars-blog/speaking-tongues-are-actively-braced?_pos=3&_sid=1b1965919&_ss=r
Gick, B., and Allen, B. (2013). Speaking tongues are always braced. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 134, 4204.
Gick, B., Allen, B., Roewer-Desperes, F, Stavness, I. (2017). Speaking tongues are actively braced. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, Vol. 60, 494-506. https://pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/2016_JSLHR-S-15-0141
Kier, WM, & Smith, KK. (1985). Tongues, tentacles and trunks: the biomechanics of movement in muscular hydrostats. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 83, 307-324.
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