Do Tongue Exercises Actually Help Kids Talk Better? What the Science Really Says

The internet is full of tongue exercises for kids. So is every pediatric speech therapy waiting room. But there's a scientific controversy you should know about — one that distinguishes effective exercises from time-filling activities. Understanding it will help you choose practice that actually moves the needle for your child, rather than going through the motions for months without progress.

The NSOME Controversy

NSOME stands for Non-Speech Oral Motor Exercises. The category includes activities like sticking out the tongue and holding it, pushing it against a spoon, moving it side to side, tongue "push-ups," and blowing through straws. These look like speech preparation — and intuitively, strengthening and mobilizing the tongue seems like it should improve how the tongue moves during speech.

The research tells a different story. ASHA (the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association) commissioned a systematic review by McCauley et al. that examined the evidence base for NSOMEs. The headline finding: traditional speech therapy that targets actual sounds showed approximately 30% improvement in target sound production. Isolated nonspeech exercises showed only approximately 3% improvement. The gap is not marginal — it's an order of magnitude. Critically, the isolated exercises didn't transfer to improved speech production.

Despite this evidence, surveys by Lof & Watson found that 67–85% of SLPs still used NSOMEs in their practice, often as warm-ups, preparation activities, or parent home programs. That figure has declined as awareness of the research has spread, but the exercises remain widely used — often with parents who don't know the distinction between high- and low-transfer activity types.

Why Doesn't Transfer Happen? The Motor Specificity Principle

The explanation comes from a foundational principle of motor learning research: you get better at what you practice, not at related activities that use similar body parts. This is motor specificity, and it applies as strongly to the tongue as to any other motor system.

The neural circuits used to control tongue movement during a swallow, during a yawn, during a tongue push-up against a spoon, and during the production of a /t/ sound are not the same circuits. They involve different motor programs, different sensory feedback loops, and different coordinative structures. Practicing one does not reliably improve the others.

This is counterintuitive because in gross motor training, building general strength and flexibility often transfers broadly. But speech production is a highly specific skilled motor activity — the tongue positions for /t/, /d/, /n/, and /l/ are precise, rapid, and coordinated with respiratory and laryngeal timing in ways that no non-speech activity replicates.

Adding nuance to the picture: 2025 research published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found that up to 71% of what had previously been classified as purely "phonological" disorders may have a motor speech component — meaning the motor question is more complex than the original NSOME debate assumed. The answer is not to return to isolated exercises, but to use speech-embedded exercises that train motor speech patterns directly.

What DOES Work

The evidence consistently supports exercises that are embedded in actual speech sound production:

• Exercises that use the same articulatory gesture as the target sound. Practicing /t/ while training tongue tip elevation — not tongue tip elevation in silence.
• High-repetition practice of target sounds in structured, graded contexts. Moving from isolated sounds, to syllables, to words, to phrases, as accuracy improves at each level.
• Rapid repetition sequences that train speed and automaticity. "Ta-ta-ta" repeated quickly trains the same motor pattern as /t/ in real speech — same position, same timing, same neural pathway. A silent tongue tap does not.
• Variability in practice. Motor learning research (Maas et al., 2008) shows that blocked practice builds initial accuracy, but variable practice builds generalization — the ability to produce sounds correctly across different words and contexts, which is the functional goal.

When Non-Speech Exercises ARE Warranted

The NSOME research does not mean all non-speech tongue exercises are useless. There are specific contexts where they are clinically appropriate:

• Post-surgical rehabilitation. After a frenectomy or cleft palate repair, the goal is rebuilding range of motion in healing tissue. This is a structural goal, not a speech-transfer goal — and it is clinically justified.
• Severe low tone or motor disorders. Children with dysarthria, childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), or hypotonia may have genuine physical limitations that benefit from targeted range-of-motion work before speech-embedded practice becomes possible.
• Myofunctional therapy targets. Tongue thrust and open-mouth resting posture involve non-speech oral functions (swallowing pattern, resting tongue position) that are themselves functional targets — not speech transfer goals.
• Brief warm-ups. A 2-minute warm-up before speech sound practice is unlikely to cause harm and may help engagement — as long as it is not confused with the primary intervention.

How to Tell If an Exercise Is Science-Backed

A quick four-question filter for any tongue exercise you encounter:

• Does it involve producing actual speech sounds, not just tongue positions in silence? ✓
• Is it paired with the specific sound being targeted in the child's therapy goals? ✓
• Does it involve enough repetitions (50+ per session is a reasonable threshold) to build durable motor patterns? ✓
• Does the child practice it daily or near-daily? ✓

If an exercise passes all four, it is structured consistently with the motor learning evidence. If it fails the first two — if it's a silent physical movement with no sound production — it may be a warm-up at best, and at worst a time investment with minimal speech payoff.

References

1. McCauley, R. J., Strand, E., Lof, G. L., Schooling, T., & Frymark, T. (2009). Evidence-based systematic review: effects of different speech treatments on children. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 18(4), 343–360. PMC7922837.
2. Lof, G. L., & Watson, M. M. (2008). A nationwide survey of nonspeech oral motor exercise use: implications for evidence-based practice. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 39(3), 392–407.
3. Ruscello, D. M. (2008). Nonspeech oral motor treatment issues related to children with developmental speech sound disorders. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 39(3), 380–391.
4. Rvachew, S., & Brosseau-Lapré, F. (2012). Developmental Phonological Disorders: Foundations of Clinical Practice. Plural Publishing.