Richey Speech Therapy provides quality services for speech sound disorders. A speech sound disorder is a communication disorder in which children have persistent difficulty in saying words or sounds correctly. A child will make mistakes as they are learning new words, but a child who does not say sounds by their expected ages may have a speech sound disorder.
Most children can say almost all of their speech sounds correctly by 5 years of age. When they are unable to, the type of speech sound disorder may be referred to as an “articulation disorder” or a “phonological disorder.”
What it Sounds Like
- Articulation – how we produce specific sounds with our mouth. An articulation disorder often involves substitutions of one sound for another. For example, a “W” for an “R” as in “wabbit” for “rabbit.” It can also be a sound distortion such as a frontal or lateral lisp.
- Phonology – refers to how we use individual sounds in the context of language. A phonological delay/disorder is identified by sound substitutions or omissions. A phonological delay/disorder often makes a child more difficult to understand, especially when there are multiple patterns in error. An example of the phonological error pattern of “fronting” is producing sounds made with the back of the tongue (e.g., /k/, and /g/) with the front of the tongue. This means the /k/ becomes a /t/ sound so “key” would sound like “tea.” If your child is 4 years old and less than 50% intelligible to unfamiliar listeners (75% for 5 year olds), then a speech assessment should be recommended.