Hailey's 3 Month Speech Assessment

Hailey's 3 month assessment went very well. We got feedback from the speech therapist and went over our goals and how close we were to hitting them. Here is what the therapist had to say about each goal we created:

Goal #1: Say word endings

Baseline: Hailey was not using word endings.

Current Level: Hailey is making progress. She can produce final consonants better when imitating targeted word from therapist. She is not able to use final consonants consistently.


Goal #2: Age appropriate sounds in all positions of the word

Baseline: Hailey was not using age appropriate sounds.

Current Level: We have been targeting progressively difficult sounds in a variety of consonant-vowel combinations. Hailey exhibits some mild motor planning for words. She imitates sounds better than in spontaneous productions. In efforts to imitate sounds, her mouth will "grope" for positioning of articulators to make the sounds. She adds "uh" sounds before initiating words. She also will produce a word that is not in an approximation of the target word in either vowel or consonant. She will often say many words many ways many time before she makes an approximation of the target word.


Goal #3: 3-4 word phrases and sentences

Baseline: Hailey was not using 3-4 word phrases.

Current Level: Hailey has many "learned" phrases that are 3-4 words in length. However, she does not use each word in a variety of other sentence structures.


Goal #4: Use nouns, verbs, and pronouns

Baseline: Hailey was not using verbs and pronouns.

Current Level: Hailey is making some progress in this area. While she continues to use her learned phrases, she is adding new words to her phrases occasionally. She continues to add "uh" when initiating a word. This is possibly due to motor planning.


Hailey has been making some good progress. Recently, she started saying her own name spontaneously, which has been great. I often call her other names just to hear her say "no I Hay-yee!" So cute! She tries to include more words and talks more overall. She is obviously still having a little trouble but she is a smart girl and gets around this, playing to her strengths by choosing to talk mostly in short, one-syllable sentences to get her point across and also uses easier words if the word is too hard. I know adults who still don't know how to use their strengths. Although she needs to practice the difficult things to get better, the therapist is impressed with her ability to get around her speech problems. The therapist did an assessment test on her to see where her speech level is at and she scored at the 2 years 6 month level. The therapist told me that I shouldn't count on this as her actual assessment since the main reason she scored so high is because she manipulated the therapist into saying the words she has trouble with first so she could repeat them since she is better at repeating than initiating. Genius! Soon, there will be no stopping this one!