The act of speaking is an automatic response with most of us. We don't stop to think and feel what a complex series of movements has to occur for us to speak a sentence. When we want to teach baseball to our children, we don’t expect them to immediately step up to the plate and hit a small baseball. We start with whiffleballs and T-ball and move on from there, because we know they are not developmentally ready to hit a baseball yet.

The same is true for muscle development for speaking. It takes the coordination of many complex muscles in the throat, jaw, tongue and lips, (just to list a few!) to make speech possible. Whisper the song, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, to yourself and feel all the different muscle movements in your lips and tongue and jaw—it’s amazing what complex patterns emerge!

For these reasons, many sounds do not develop in a child's speech until as late as 7 or 8 years of age because of the different muscles positions that must be used to make that particular sound. Then some sounds such as the "r" sound are actually made 14 different ways! The child must then have the ability to make all the sounds together in words which is another difficult level of speech to develop.

Speaking, like baseball, takes coordination