Clear Speech Strategies to Improve Speech Intelligibility

As a speech-language pathologist, improving a student’s intelligibility is often about more than teaching individual sounds. It’s about supporting good communication in everyday situations.

Reduced intelligibility can lead to a host of challenges beyond a few miscommunications. Difficulty being understood can affect classroom participation, peer interactions, and a student’s willingness to speak up at all. SLPs can reduce this impact by targeting clear speech strategies and supporting carryover into everyday communication.

What is speech intelligibility?

Speech intelligibility refers to how well a listener can understand a speaker’s spoken message. It is often expressed as a percentage of correctly understood words. This measure can be influenced by various factors, such as background noise, environmental acoustics, and the listener's familiarity with the speaker or topic.

While familiar listeners (such as family members or close friends) often understand a speaker more easily, unfamiliar listeners (like teachers, peers, or community members) provide a more accurate measure of how well speech is understood in real-world situations.

How does speech intelligibility develop in children?

Researchers Hustad et al. (2021) examined the development of speech intelligibility in 538 typically developing children aged 30 months to 9 years, 11 months. While much of the existing research focuses on developmental norms for individual speech sounds, this study evaluated both single-word and sentence intelligibility. The findings help establish developmental norms for speech intelligibility.

This table summarizes the estimated ages at which 50% of children achieve various speech intelligibility thresholds based on the research of Hustad et al.:

Intelligibility	Single Words	Sentences
50%	2 years, 7 months	2 years, 10 months
75%	4 years, 1 month	3 years, 10 months
90%	6 years, 11 months	5 years, 2 months

A second table further supports clinical guidance by outlining the estimated ages at which 95% of children achieve the same thresholds. The data may help SLPs evaluate a child's need for therapeutic intervention.

Intelligibility	Single Words	Sentences
50%	3 years, 11 months	3 years, 11 months
75%	7 years, 3 months	5 years, 1 month
90%	>10 years	7 years, 3 months

Is intelligibility a good goal for speech therapy?

Speech pathologists may choose to take an overall intelligibility approach to therapy for students who can produce speech sounds in drills or other structured activities, but are not consistently understood in everyday life.

This approach could benefit students with articulation disorders or motor speech disorders (such as apraxia of speech). It could also be helpful for students with prosodic errors, including those with hearing loss or traumatic brain injury, in which altered rate, stress, or rhythm could reduce intelligibility.

Unclear speech may lead to many problems. It often causes miscommunications with others. Students may be asked to repeat themselves, which can make them feel frustrated or embarrassed. Repeated issues with intelligibility may contribute to decreased self-confidence or other emotional development problems. 

Decreased intelligibility can impact a student's friendships, academic success, home life, and community involvement. Helping students achieve clearer speech is a great goal for both young children and older students in speech therapy.

Writing Intelligibility Goals for Speech Therapy

Time to drop the individual sound accuracy! 🥳 Speech therapy goals for intelligibility focus on how well the student is understood. Like all other goals, they should be functional, measurable, and tied to real communication contexts, such as conversation, classroom participation, or community interactions. Goals may even emphasize intelligibility strategies (discussed below). For example:

"______ will show increased speech intelligibility by using strategies (slow rate, appropriate volume, etc.) with 90% accuracy during a five minute conversation in 2 out of 3 opportunities."

Targeting Intelligibility in Speech Therapy

To achieve meaningful gains in how well students are understood, intelligibility needs to be addressed intentionally in therapy. The following strategies and activities provide concrete, effective ways for students to improve speech clarity and apply these skills beyond structured practice.

Learn intelligibility strategies.

When working with students, SLPs often use the phrase "clear speech" to describe speech that is easy for listeners to understand. Students can learn (and practice) clear speech strategies in therapy sessions, such as:

💡 Use a medium rate of speech.

Students can use pacing boards or other visuals to maintain an adequate speech rate that is neither too fast nor too slow. 

💡 Incorporate natural pauses.

Students can practice identifying where and how to use short pauses in their connected speech to help slow the rate and give listeners time to process the words. 

💡 Use an appropriate volume.

Help students recognize what an appropriate volume is for different situations. For example, at a basketball game, we need to speak louder to be understood.

💡 Turn your body so others can see you.

Similarly, students can practice ensuring that listeners can see their mouths, facial expressions, and body language to assist in understanding.

💡 Be aware of speech production.

Students (especially those who have had more traditional articulation therapy targeting one or more specific sounds) can identify when their speech contains those sounds and pay extra attention to ensure correct pronunciation.

💡 Use precise mouth movements.

Some students can benefit from using more purposeful articulatory contacts to avoid their speech sounding "mushy" or mumbled.

Clear Speech Strategies PDF

Years ago, I created these visual supports to provide clear pictures of the strategies and guide intelligibility therapy in a structured way. The resource includes versions for both younger kids and middle school and high school students. 

Activities to Practice  Clear Speech

Obviously, students need to do more than learn intelligibility strategies. They need consistent practice across a variety of situations to improve clarity of speech.

Reading Tasks

From reading single words to paragraphs and pages, reading is a great way to practice intelligibility strategies with older students. It reduces the demand on students, as they don't have to formulate their thoughts. They can just read the words while concentrating on implementing proper breath support, clear articulation, or any other specific focus of intelligibility therapy.

You may use academic texts, high-interest passages, conversation role plays, funny fill-in-the-blank stories, or any other age-appropriate book or article to work on these skills.

Structured Conversation

Structured activities and games are a great next step. Predictable prompts, visual supports, and clearly defined expectations can provide just the right amount of guidance. Here are some of my favorite activities to use in these instances:

• Guessing games allow students to ask and answer repeated questions using similar sentence structures.

• When answering poll questions, students share their opinions and brief explanations on specific topics.

• Barrier games are a great way to ensure students use their strategies to be understood by a peer when giving directions.

Self-Monitoring

Helping students self-monitor their speech is critical for carryover of the skills. Initially, this could mean referring to and reminding of intelligibility strategies or using rating scales to evaluate their own speech or the speech of others (without judgment, of course).

Want a visual for helping students monitor their own speech? Download these FREE self-rating scales for students to evaluate their use of strategies and speech intelligibility. They're perfect for therapy and home or classroom carryover.

Clear Speech Self Rating Scales.pdf

Download PDF • 4.88MB

Students can also learn to monitor their communication partner to identify miscommunications. When this occurs, they can use a communication repair strategy to repair the breakdown.

Generalization

You can help students with generalizing skills by role-playing real-life situations from home, school, and community settings. If needed, collaborate with families or school staff to make the scenarios as realistic as possible.

Free Resource for Clear Speech Strategies

These bookmarks serve as a succinct, portable reminder of intelligibility strategies. They are free for email subscribers and can also be taped to a desk, stored in a wallet or backpack, or hung on a refrigerator to serve as a helpful visual cue for students who are learning to implement them in daily routines.

👉 Remember that the goal is effective communication and not perfection. Empower students to be confident in their communication and use their strategies as tools when needed.

Reference:

Hustad, K. C., Mahr, T. J., Natzke, P., & Rathouz, P. J. (2021). Speech development between 30 and 119 months in typical children I: Intelligibility growth curves for single-word and multiword productions. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_JSLHR-21-00142

📌 Got a speech therapy board on Pinterest? SAVE the love ❤️