Speech Sound Disorders
What is a Speech Sound Disorder (articulation / phonological)?
Articulation is the process of speaking. While it may feel natural to many, articulation is truly an art, involving incredible coordination of many body parts, including your tongue, lips, jaws and vocal cords to form sounds, syllables, and words. Difficulty in sound production may result in an articulation disorder. Rule based errors tend to be classified as phonological disorders.
What Is an Articulation Disorder?
An articulation disorder is a difficulty in producing a single or a few sounds or consistently mispronouncing specific consonants and vowels. Sounds can be substituted, left off, added or changed.
Sometimes the reasons behind the articulation disorder may be obvious like a diagnosis of cleft palate, cerebral palsy, hearing loss or even dental problems. Habitual thumb sucking can often lead to an overbite which can lead to articulation problems in children. A tongue thrust is when the tongue pushes through the front teeth, this can impact speech clarity and distort some sounds.
What Is a Phonological Disorder?
Phonological disorders are a type of speech sound disorder but are different from more common articulation disorders. Children acquire speech and language skills by listening and imitating adults around them. As they develop articulation skills, some children have difficulty imitating all the sounds that they hear. To overcome this challenge, the brain creates rules to simplify communication and make words easier to say.
For example, some sounds that are produced in the back of the mouth like (/k/ and /g/) are often difficult for kids to say so they simplify it by making a rule to make the sounds in the front of the mouth as it is easier, so “tootie” is substituted for “cookie”. Another common example of a phonological process is when the final consonant is deleted, where “dog” becomes “dah” and “cat” becomes “ca”.
What are Signs of Speech Sound Disorders – Articulation and Phonology?
Functional speech sound disorders are the umbrella term for articulation and phonological disorders. Though mistakes are common when learning new words and sounds, a disorder occurs when a child reaches a certain age and is still making certain mistakes or when an adult is experiencing difficulty with pronunciation.
Here are some revealing questions to ask yourself:
- Is the child or adolescents easily understood by others?
- Do people perceive your child as being younger because of speech difficulties?
- Is the child or adult experiencing frustration when trying to communicate?
- Is your child omitting sounds, substituting sounds or changing sounds when speaking?
