ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the details of how to carry out listening and discrimination activities with children with speech impairments. Children with speech impairments need help with learning to use a wider range of sounds in words. The child needs to incorporate sounds into their phonological system, which entails reorganisation of the system. These children usually need to carry out listening and discrimination activities related to their error patterns, to assist in this process. Two or more words that sound the same when spoken, but have different meanings are referred to as homophones. When children have phonological impairments, they produce many homophones that are not found in adult speech. Carrying out tasks that place few extra demands on the child will mean that they remain focused on listening. Discrimination of non-words – those that sound like possible English words but are not, such as ‘wape’, ‘lape’ and ‘dape’ – is used in psycholinguistic approaches to assessment, diagnosis and intervention.
