Initial Consonant Deletion: Minimal Pairs and Therapy Activities
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What is initial consonant deletion and why is it considered an atypical speech error?
Hey, hey, hey, everybody! This is Carrie Clark from SpeechandlanguageKids.com. You are listening to the Speech and Language Kids podcast, full of resources and activities for parents of children with speech and language delays, as well as the professionals who serve them. This is episode number 21, and today we are talking about initial consonant deletion. This is going to be a new kind of format for my podcast. This episode is going to be what I'm going to call a speech spotlight. And I'm going to be shining the spotlight on one particular item in speech and language, one disorder, one therapy, one topic, and just giving you a quick sound bite about what that uh topic is and um any ideas for that. So today we're just gonna be talking real briefly about initial consonant deletion.
This will be a short episode. Get you the information, get you down and on your way. So what is initial consonant deletion? Well, initial consonant deletion is when a child is consistently leaving off the beginning consonant of a word. So if the word was stick, then they would say ick. Or if the word was tree, then they would say e. So you can imagine that this can this would make a child's speech very hard to understand if there are no beginning consonants on words. We use consonants at the beginning of words a lot in the English language. Now, while young children often leave off consonants at the ends of word, it is not quite as common for children to delete beginning consonants to words. So for this reason, initial consonant deletion is considered an atypical speech error.
It's not one that we see in typically developing children. So if a child has initial consonant deletion, it's kind of a red flag that there's something going on that needs to be addressed. So children who have initial consonant deletion would benefit greatly from being evaluated by a speech language pathologist. If you are a parent who does not yet have a speech therapist and you're noticing this pattern in your child, you definitely need to go ahead and seek help from a speech language pathologist. But this will also give you an overview of how it's treated and You can kind of start working on these things at home while you're waiting to get in to see that speech therapist. Okay, so how do we treat initial consonant deletion?
Well, initial consonant deletion is considered a phonological disorder. And what a phonological disorder is, is it is a rule that the child has developed in his or her head that tells that child how to use sounds. So um for this particular phonological disorder, that rule is that all consonants at the beginning of the words will be deleted. Now keep in mind this isn't because this child has just decided, oh, I think I'm just gonna get rid of all my beginning consonants. That's just how the child's brain is making speech more simple. So speech is too hard for this child, so his brain says, Okay, well it would be easier if we just took off all beginning consonants. Let's just ignore all those consonants at the beginning of the words.
What we need to do for therapy is we need to retrain his brain to overwrite that rule. So we need him to say, hey, wait a minute. No, there aren't there are sounds at the beginning of of words, and we need to, we need to be listening to those, we need to be producing those. So here are the steps to treating initial consonant deletion. The first thing you want to do is you want to find what we call minimal pairs, and that would be two words that are exactly the same, ex that sound exactly the same, except for one sound. In this case, those minimal pairs are going to be words that are the same except for one has a beginning consonant and one does not. So an example of this would be up and cup. Notice how the cup has a k at the beginning, but otherwise it is exactly like the word up.
Or another example would be off and cough. Now think about the sounds on this one and not the spelling. So off and cough are the same except that there's a k sound at the beginning of the off for cough.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is initial consonant deletion and why is it considered an atypical speech error?
0:00–3:38
2
How can parents identify if their child needs professional evaluation for initial consonant deletion?
3:38–8:30
3
What are minimal‑pair word lists and how do they help treat initial consonant deletion?
8:30–12:22
4
How should I create and use picture cards for the minimal‑pair activities?
12:22–12:48