Understanding speech sound disorders

Today we will 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). Our aim in this newsletter is to explain more about functional speech sound disorders. A speech sound disorder is characterized by a child using substitutions, omissions, additions, distortions, or syllable level errors impacting overall intelligibility.

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 help them from hearing the sound correctly, producing the sound by itself, all the way through producing that speech sound in conversation independently.  It is important to note, that by age 4, children should be 100% intelligible to unfamiliar listeners at the conversational level.

 A child with a phonological disorder will use pattern based errors. These patterns are called phonological processes, and they are patterns used by ALL children to simplify speech as they learn how to say more challenging sounds ex: “wabbit” for “rabbit”. As children mature, so should their speech production. Most of the phonological processes are eliminated in connected speech by age 5. Children with phonological disorders have error patterns that persist past the recommended age of elimination. 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). So, what exactly are the ages of acquisition of speech sounds? See the below ages and the speech sounds associated!

Age 2: P,B,D,M,N,H,W.

Age 3: T,K,G,F,NG,Y

Age 4: S, Z, V, SH, CH, J, L

Age 5: R, ZH, Voiced TH

Age 6: Voiceless TH