What’s so important about a Place, Voice & Manner chart?

There is more than one way to analyze and describe a child’s speech, and a Place-Voice-Manner (PVM) Chart is one of those tools that is sp useful to have in your analysis toolkit.

This type of analysis broadly describes a child’s speech system in terms of:

PLACE of articulation: this includes labial, dental, alveolar, postalveolar, palatal, velar, and glottal

VOICING: whether the consonant is voice or voiceless

MANNER of articulation: stops, fricatives, affricates, nasals, liquids, and glides

Reasons to use a Place-Voice-Manner chart

It allows you to analyze a child’s speech system from a different point of view. Many SLPs are familiar with listing phonological patterns, but this chart can help you to “look beyond” these patterns to describe the child’s speech sound system. For example, your analysis might show that the child can only use voiced consonants, or perhaps all fricatives and affricates are absent from their sound system.

MY TIP: Use whiteboard markers to color-code present vs. absent sounds to that you have a visual representation of the child’s speech. This can help you to see patterns more clearly.

It can also be useful for children with phonological deficits who substitute one sound for another. If your child’s speech shows deletions, distortions, or changes to the syllable structure (e.g., cluster reduction), it may not be useful.

It can help you with target selection for phonological approaches such as multiple oppositions and maximal oppositions. These approaches encourage the SLP to choose targets that have distinct differences in terms of place, voice, and manner to other sounds.