12 Mar Does My Child Have a Speech Sound Disorder?
Who can forget those early years of childhood when our kids begin to talk and sometimes say the funniest things as they develop their speech skills? Words like rabbit and hungry become wabbit and hungwy, or you may notice that your child usually doesn’t say two consonants next to each other, so a word like clean becomes cean. Many of the errors children make are normal as they go through the typical developmental milestones to acquire the speech sounds of their language, but you might be wondering where the cutoff between typical baby talk and actually having a disorder is.
It’s important to first provide some vocabulary about what we’re discussing here. Speech-language pathologists have an umbrella term called Speech Sound Disorders which includes a variety of difficulties with speech sounds. Speech sound disorders can be organic (meaning they have an underlying motor, structural or sensory cause, like a cleft palate or brain injury) or functional (these are idiopathic, they have no known cause). There are two types of Speech Sound Disorders we will discuss, articulation disorders and phonological disorders.
Articulation Disorder
An articulation disorder has to do with making an error on a single sound or a few sounds, like when your child can’t say their “r” or “s” sounds. Some errors on certain sounds are normal as a child learns to pronounce the sounds in their language, but by a certain age all speech sounds should be mastered. This chart is really helpful, as it shows the age range by which 90% of children in the U.S. can say specific sound(s) correctly:
Bottom Line: Most sounds in English are acquired by age 6, although there is some room for variation.
Phonological Disorder
A phonological disorder has to do with making patterns of errors that affect multiple sounds, like when a child doesn’t say all the syllables in a word so banana becomes nana, or when a child always replaces the “f” with the “p” like in fish/pish and finger/pinger. Just like with articulation errors, there is often an age range during which these errors are a normal part of development; we get concerned when a child continues to make these errors past the typical age range. This chart highlights some common types of phonological processes and their typical age of elimination:
Bottom Line: Most phonological processes are eliminated by 3 or 4 years, with a few that take longer.
Does my child need treatment?
While it might be hard for you to determine the specifics of your child’s errors (e.g., is it articulation or phonological?), this chart provides good general information about speech intelligibility (how much of your child’s overall speech should be understood):
Bottom Line: If you are concerned with the way your child sounds, you and others have a hard time understanding them (compared to the norms above; e.g., your 5 year old is less than 75% intelligible), and/or your child is showing frustration because they feel people don’t understand them, it’s time to call your speech-language pathologist for an assessment.
Helpful Links:
Written by: Naguine Bensimon Tree, M.A., CCC-SLP, bilingual certification
References:
Hanks, W., Heidi Hanks Heidi has been a practicing Speech-Language Pathologist since 2000. She graduated from U, & Hanks, H. (n.d.). What are Phonological Processes? Retrieved January 18, 2021, from http://mommyspeechtherapy.com/?p=2158
McLeod, K., Crowe, K., McLeod, S., & Disclosure: The authors have declared that no competing interests existed at the time of publication. Correspondence to Sharynne McLeod: [email protected] Editor-in-Chief: Julie Barkmeier-Kraemer Editor: Mary K. (2019, December 21). Children’s English Consonant Acquisition in the United States: A Review. Retrieved January 18, 2021, from https://pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/2020_AJSLP-19-00168
McLeod, S. (2020, August 03). Speech acquisition. Retrieved January 18, 2021, from https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-acquisition
Selected Phonological Processes. (n.d.). Retrieved January 18, 2021, from https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/clinical-topics/articulation-and-phonology/selected-phonological-processes/
Speech Sound Disorders: Articulation and Phonology. (n.d.). Retrieved January 18, 2021, from https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/clinical-topics/articulation-and-phonology/#collapse_2
That one time a journal article on speech sounds broke the SLP internet. (n.d.). Retrieved January 18, 2021, from https://www.theinformedslp.com/how-to/that-one-time-a-journal-article-on-speech-sound-norms-broke-the-slp-internet