Phonemic hearing impairment. How to overcome it?

A well-developed phonemic hearing is “responsible” for the correct perception of phonemes in spoken speech in children aged 4-5 years. It is thanks to him that we can determine:

• what specific sound is in the word;
• where in the word the sound is located - at the end, in the middle or at the beginning;
• how many sounds are in a word - different and identical, in what sequence they are found.

Sometimes children, even without any problems with sound pronunciation, simply “don’t hear” this or that sound, replacing it with another. Phonetic hearing disorders lead to delayed speech development, problems with the perception and pronunciation of sounds and, as a consequence, a deterioration in the child’s level of social communication and a decrease in learning ability.

The good news is that this process can be influenced. Speech therapists use various techniques in their work to develop phonemic hearing. Many exercises can be done with your child and at home, as part of independent work.

The development of phonemic hearing includes work in several areas at once:

• recognition of non-speech sounds;
• distinguishing the pitch and timbre of spoken sounds;
• distinguishing in speech words that are similar in sound;
• determining word length and number of syllables;
• correct identification of phonemes in a word.

Games and exercises for developing the perception of non-speech sounds

In classes with preschool children, various musical instruments, all kinds of “sounding” objects and toys are widely used. It is important that the child learns to easily determine what sound he hears.

1. "What's singing?" The child is invited to listen to the sounds of musical instruments - a children's pipe, drum, piano, xylophone. It is necessary to determine the sound of which instrument he heard.
2. "Magic boxes". Pour different fillings into cardboard boxes - peas, cereals, sand, metal buttons or paper clips. Let the child, with his eyes closed, listen to one of the boxes rattle, and then find it among the others by the sound.
3. It can be very interesting to find out what the world around us sounds like. Try with your children to determine by sound what is happening - water is flowing, a cabinet door is opening, a vacuum cleaner is humming, etc.

Legasthenia

It is possible that phonetics is a completely sufficient tool for studying and describing the evolution and migration of languages. However, in the field of practical children's pedagogy, modern phonetics not only does not solve many problems of speech correction and literacy teaching, but, on the contrary, often aggravates these problems. Methodists are increasingly sophisticated and honing their developments in accordance with accepted concepts, and the practical effectiveness of these latest developments is falling more and more. Europeans look with bewilderment at how statistics on legasthenia worsen from year to year.

(Legasthenia is a general term for dyslexia and dyscalculia, a didactic disorder in which intellectually healthy people have serious problems learning to read and write.)

The number of legasthenics in English- and French-speaking countries exceeds 9% of the population. Until recently, in Germany this figure was 6%. According to current data from the Dislexieverband, among 7.8 million German children aged 6 to 15 years, 1.8 million are officially recognized as legasthenics/dyslexics [1]

In Russia, there are only 3% of legasthenics, and this disease does not manifest itself in such an extreme form as in the West - although with great problems, almost all Russian children who do not suffer from intellectual disabilities are taught Russian reading.

At the same time, in Japan the number of legasthenics is zero. [2] Western researchers are trying to explain this fact by the fact that Japanese writing is close to drawings and, as a result, is perceived by the right hemisphere of the brain. However, in Israel and the United Arab Emirates, letters are in no way drawings, and yet legasthenia in Israel appears only in cases where teaching immigrant children to read begins not with Hebrew, but with Russian or English. There is a direct relationship between the emergence of legasthenia and the traditional Western phoneme-letter teaching methodology.

Training the perception of volume and sound intensity

In tasks of this type, the child learns to correlate the strength of sound with the distance to its source, and to focus on timbre and volume.

1. “Zhmurki” is the most famous version of this game. Blindfold your child and ask him to find you while listening to you clap your hands. You can avoid someone who is “squinting” and change locations.
2. "We're hiding from the wolf." Children are bunnies playing in the clearing to music. Quiet music means everything is calm, loud music means a wolf is coming, you have to hide.
3. "Let's draw a sound." Invite your child to draw the length of the sound. Take a tambourine, a children's piano or a pipe. If the sound is long, you need to draw a long line on the piece of paper, and vice versa.
4. It is very useful to simply dance to music. Ask what the child wanted to express in the dance, what feelings the melody aroused in him. Or ask them to draw an illustration for a piece of music.

How to prevent hearing loss in children?

If this is due to heredity, genetic disorders, then, alas, at this stage of development of medical science - nothing. The main advice is not to neglect an annual hearing test; in this case, “overdoing it” is better than missing out. At an early stage, hearing loss is easier to detect and correct.

Violations associated with complications after illnesses can be tried to be prevented, of course, only by protecting yourself from these diseases, hardening yourself, and not ignoring treatment and rehabilitation.

You should also try to avoid prolonged exposure to noise. It’s not scary if a person finds himself in an environment with loud sounds for a few minutes. But when a teenager wears headphones all day long, and the music from them can be heard from the other side of the room, this is already dangerous. Many scientific works confirm the connection between the development of hearing loss and chronic noise injuries. This, of course, is not a reason to quarrel with your daughter or teenage son and completely deprive them of those headphones. The currently recognized safe standard is to spend no more than 2-3 hours a day wearing high-quality professional headphones with a volume below 80 dB. It’s enough to play games and enjoy your favorite music.

Everything needs to be approached wisely. And be healthy!

Exercises on the ability to distinguish words that sound similar

1. "What did I say?" Place pictures of different objects in front of your child. Name words that sound similar (lac-rac-mac, mouse-bear), the child must show a card with the desired picture.
2. “Correct the mistake.” Children love to correct adults. Ask them to find mistakes in your words - “We have hats on our feet, we’ll wear slippers outside,” etc.
3. “Rhymes” - when reading poetry, pause at the end of the quatrain, let the child finish the sentence himself. Many riddles are built on this same principle.
4. "Applause". Show the picture and ask the child to clap if you name it correctly. For example, hat-slub-gag.

Games for teaching the perception of word length and syllable discrimination

• "Who's the odd one out?" The adult pronounces the same syllables, adding one similar one at the end (pa-pa-pa-ba, ta-ta-ta-cha).
• "Repeat after me!" Pronounce the syllables by blocking your mouth with your palm or a piece of paper so that the child cannot “count” the sound by articulation. His task is to correctly repeat what he heard (sha-sha-zha, si-zi-si). Perhaps a chain of three syllables will seem difficult to children with auditory memory impairment, in which case you can start with two syllables, gradually complicating the task.
• “How many syllables” - together with an adult, children must count the number of syllables in a word. Pronounce the words in chorus, slowly, marking each syllable with a clap of your hands.

Why develop phonemic awareness?

The formation of speech skills begins from the first minutes of a newborn’s life - with his screaming, humming, and babbling. But the baby consciously pronounces his first words towards the end of the first year of life. During the second year, the ability to pronounce words improves, but pronunciation remains unclear and imprecise. By the end of the third year of life, it is already possible to trace the first signs of imperfect phonemic hearing:

• it is difficult for a child to pronounce words consisting of more than two syllables (a syllable is a combination of a consonant and a vowel);

• the child skips syllables in words and replaces sounds.

If the environment is favorable, the child hears correct speech, communicates a lot, then by the age of four the situation improves. Long words of several syllables and hissing sounds appear in one’s own speech, but there are problems with the complex sounds R-L-Y. This is where you need to work to avoid making mispronunciation the norm. At the age of five, a preschooler must learn to pronounce all sounds correctly without exception, hear the syllabic structure of a word and accurately reproduce it.

What happens if the child himself cannot cope with the language load, and there is no timely assistance in the development of phonemic hearing? A persistent speech disorder will appear due to incorrect perception and pronunciation of words. Violation of pronunciation norms is a serious defect, which in speech therapy practice is called phonetic-phonemic underdevelopment of speech and automatically makes a primary school student a potential D student, or at most a C student, in the Russian language.

Without being able to distinguish between individual sounds and syllables, a student will not learn to analyze a word, divide it into syllables and morphemes (parts), and see the spelling - that is, a dangerous place in which one can spell it wrong. It will be impossible to even write down the word correctly, that is, a persistent violation of the rules of graphics will form.

Problems cannot be avoided in live, spoken speech. The active vocabulary will remain poor, and understanding of the grammar of the native language will be impaired. The child will not be able to read correctly, create his own statement, intonate individual sentences and the text as a whole; it will be difficult for him to regulate the pace and volume of speech, and pronounce complex words correctly. This means that psychological discomfort will inevitably arise, which will affect behavior.

Is it necessary to develop phonemic awareness? The answer to this question is obvious. Moreover, you need to start not on the eve of entering first grade, but much earlier. It is better to start classes at the age of three, and then constantly devote as much time as possible to speech practice.

Exercises to distinguish phonemes and develop analysis and synthesis skills

1. One of the most common games on this topic is selecting words starting with a specific letter. Whoever can come up with the most words wins.
2. Another option is a variation of the city game. You need to come up with a word that begins with the last letter of the previous one (bus - plum - orange).
3. "Collect the word." The adult says the letters of the word separately (R-Y-B-A), and the child must name the whole word. Or you can play the other way around so that the children name the letters.
4. Games with cards. From a set of pictures, the child must find an image of an object in which the given sound is at the beginning of the word, at the end, in the middle. For example, R - River, tigR, matros.
5. “What is the common sound?” - the adult says a few words, and the child must say what sound is in all the words (cat, hat, stick - the sound Ш).

The development of phonemic hearing in children is an important task. However, when planning classes, you need to remember that they need to be conducted in a playful way, not to tire the child, and be sure to praise for success. In addition to the development of phonemic hearing, it is necessary to pay attention to the development of logical and creative thinking and articulatory gymnastics. Start with exercises that he can do, gradually making the tasks more difficult. A good mood and interest are the best motivation.

Publication date: November 25, 2016. Last modified: 05/09/2018.

What is phonemic awareness

If a child’s speech is slurred after three or four years, he replaces or confuses sounds in syllables, this can indicate underdeveloped phonemic hearing. Both teachers and parents urgently need to address the child’s speech development in order to eliminate violations. Maybe we are talking about a physical pathology: hearing loss in a child. In this case, the help of doctors is required. Or maybe the kindergartener needs other help: regular exercises to develop phonemic awareness.

This type of hearing is more subtle; it is what allows the child to recognize sound, systematize and distinguish between different sounds, and then use this information in his own speech.

Parents can determine whether phonemic hearing is well developed by the following speech operations:

• the child hears a certain sound in a word, confidently names it or says that the named sound does not exist;

• the child distinguishes words that are similar in sound but different in meaning;

• it distinguishes between words consisting of the same phonemes.

The brain of children develops intensively, and full phonemic hearing allows them to solve not only speech, but also logical, moral, and aesthetic problems. The sooner you start developing it, the more socially and educationally successful the little person will grow up. The native language provides full communication with peers and adults, develops the psyche, and allows you to join the culture.

Language plays a unique role in the formation of a child’s personality. It is the point at which emotions and thinking, memory and imagination converge. On the one hand, the child needs to be taught to recognize spoken speech, on the other hand, to use it correctly.