Treating speech sound disorders

To kick off this first blog post of the new year, we wanted to focus on speech sound disorders. Speech Sound Disorders is an umbrella term referring to any difficulty a child may have with the perception, motor production or phonological representation of speech sounds and speech segments (ASHA 2023).

Speech Sound Disorders can be either functional or organic in nature. Functional speech sound disorders include articulation and phonology based disorders. Organic speech sound disorders include those that are motor based (ex: apraxia), structural (ex: related to cleft palate), and sensory based (ex: resulting from hearing impairment). With so many different kinds of speech sounds disorders, today we will focus on functional speech sound disorders.

A child with an articulation disorder may have problems forming speech sounds properly due to weakness, poor range of motion or decreased awareness of proper place and manner of how speech sounds are produced. Looking at the photo above, you can see the steps we take with children to work them up from hearing the sound correctly, producing the sound by itself, all the way to producing that speech sound in conversation independently.

 A child with a phonological disorder can produce their sounds correctly, but may use them in the wrong place or make consistent substitutions. For example, a child who says “tottie” instead of “cookie” is using a frontal sound /t/ instead of back sound /k/. This is a phonological process called “fronting” and is typically eliminated in connected speech by age three and half. Phonological processes are typical patterns used by all children to simplify speech as they learn how to say more challenging sounds. As children mature, so should their speech production, where most of these patterns are eliminated by age 5. We always recommend initiating speech therapy services EARLY for speech sound disorders as there is a direct link to lower literacy outcomes in children with speech sound delays (Overby, Trainin, Smit, Bernthal, & Nelson, 2012).

Speech therapy is the tool needed to remediate articulation delays and disorders and phonological delays and disorders