In early intervention, what should be increased to improve intelligibility?

Increasing phonological awareness skills is critical in early intervention as this directly influences a child’s ability to distinguish and manipulate the sounds in speech, which is a foundational component for clear communication. Enhanced phonological awareness supports the development of phonemic awareness, which helps children recognize and produce the different sounds that make up words.

When children are taught to identify and isolate sounds, blend sounds together, and segment words, they become better equipped to articulate their thoughts more clearly and improve their overall speech intelligibility. This improvement is essential for their communicative success and can have great long-term benefits in their language development.

The other areas, such as vocabulary complexity, might enhance a child’s language skills overall but wouldn't directly target the clarity of their speech sounds. Social interaction promotes communication but does not specifically address the mechanics of speech production. Syntax complexity can enhance sentence construction and grammatical correctness but does not necessarily lead to improved speech clarity and intelligibility. Thus, focusing on phonological awareness provides the most direct route to improving a child’s speech clarity in early intervention contexts.