Speech Sound Disorders
Speech Sound Disorders?
As children develop their language skills, they learn to produce sounds. Most children say /p/, /m/, and /w/ early on, while sounds like /r/, /l/, or “th” often take longer to master.
By four years old, children should be able to produce and say the majority of speech sounds. When a child is having difficulties with a sound that should have been mastered based on the child’s chronological and linguistic ages, it might be an indication of a speech sound disorder. This may either be an articulation or a phonological disorder.
Articulation Disorder – This affects children’s speech on a phonetic and motoric level, which means they have trouble saying individual speech sounds, e.g. consonants and vowels.
For example, when a child cannot produce the /l/ sound, when he or she should be able to produce it based on the chronological and linguistic ages, and does not show a systematic error pattern (see below for phonological disorder), one can then assume that it is an articulation disorder.
Phonological Disorder – This disorder occurs at the phonemic/linguistic/cognitive levels (a level higher than the phonetic/motoric aspects of speech production. Children with a phonological disorder show systematic patterns with their speech production errors, e.g. consistently delete /m/ in initial sounds, by saying “at” for “mat” or “ad” for “mad” for CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, when the age error is unexpected for the child’s chronological and linguistic ages.