A speech pathologist recently pointed out to my wife and I that a hard of hearing child needs exposure to all the individual sounds of the English language in order to speak well. Since our child specifically has a hope of complete normal hearing one day, we are working hard to enable him to speak. It turns out that hearing people pick up all the different sounds (or phonemes) naturally.

She gave us an example by producing a couple of the various clicks used in the Xhosa language. We found that we had great difficulty reproducing the clicks because we had not grown up with those sounds. In the same way, hard of hearing children have problems with words that contain sounds they have not been taught. For example, take the word measure. It has five sounds in it, m, eh, zh, u, r. (The u is really quick.) The zh sound isn’t used much in English, but hearing people can usually say measure with no problems. If a hard of hearing child, however, is not exposed to zh, his pronounciation will be quite different. He or she may not even be able to say this word. Try it yourself.

The Pathologist produced her own flashcards to use with the children in her practice. Each card had a picture and stressed one individual sound or phoneme in the English language. She regularly goes through all 40 with her children with great success. Even children that receive hearing aids later in life show improvement.

I’ll get the link to her flashcards. When they’re finished, I’ll put mine on this site. When I searched for English phonemes, I found that no one agrees on how many are in the English language. Some say 38, some say almost 50. I decided that I would use as many as I could distinguish in my own speech. Don’t get bogged down in how many there are in your own searches. Just use the first few pages of your dictionary. Each sounds is given with an example word. A as in father. E as in bed, and so on. Even without pictures, it is worthwhile to use the list of example words in your dictionary so that your child can be exposed to all the sounds in the language.

Good luck!