Children with speech sound disorders can finally get the chance to speak better as Specialist speech and language therapist, Kate Beckett, launches a child-friendly app to help children with speech sound disorder.
Kate Beckett, who is also the founder of Ultimate Speech Sounds, brings a solution to this disorder with a soon-to-be launched app that will assist correct speech sound disorders in little children.
That’s exciting news right?
Did you know that Sound errors often happen when your child is acquiring his or her language skills newly and most mistakes they will utter will disappear when they are older.
What this app will do will be, helping with those errors that persist after your child’s peers have stopped making the same mistakes.
It’s at this level when speech therapists typically come into the scene and Beckett’s app is designed as a means for children with these issues to use in their practices. It also helps them to connect with their parents, as performing the prescribed remedial exercises consistently and rightly at home is enough to correct any of those disorders.
Beckett says that,
“The app allows both the parent and child to have an animated visual tool to guide home practice rather than the parent trying to remember what the therapist told them to do,”
“Tracking home practice allows the therapist to tailor strategies as the child progresses and provides an incentive to the parents who can see the results of their efforts. Engaging the parents is crucial as only 16 per cent of the correction is done in the clinic. The rest is done at home.”
Beckett began working as a speech therapist in the UK, New Zealand and Ireland and in her discovery, she found out that same sound disorders sprout wherever children are learning English for the first time. But it has been suggested that there are apps out online that will help but no one of them provides a voice with an Irish accent. It was this shortage that inspired Beckett to begin thinking about creating another alternative. She said,
“During the Covid lockdown, I was trying to teach children to speak using a model with an American accent when it was an Irish accent I needed,” she continued.
“Existing options only teach with British and American accents so I could see the potential to broaden the app to cover other regions. My app teaches phonics (speech sounds) in seven different English-speaking country accents, including Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and South African.”
Ultimately, Speech Sounds is created around a child avatar called Dara (digitized automated realistic articulator) , unlike other apps, Dara app shows the avatar’s whole face. With this it makes it very easier for the child to see how sounds are created.
Other existing apps will show a flying mouth and tongue and this will make young children find it difficult relating with what they’re seeing. With Dara, your child will surely see how the avatar is creating the sound from both the front and the side view. They will also hear the sounds spoken out correctly and will copy the mouth positioning of the avatar’s mouth to enhance their pronunciation.
Specialist Beckett has worked hard in ensuring that Dara is empowered with superior graphics that have strong visual appearance for children, she has also created the illusion that it’s a child talking to a child that causes the whole experience to be user friendly.
Moreover, since this is a child-oriented app that has shared information, one of the problems that Beckett had to resolve was child safeguarding GDPR. Let’s not forget that she worked with a company specializing in protecting children’s data and this company has assisted Special Beckett in overseeing the app’s development at every stage to assure it is globally accepted.
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