Articulation and Phonological Delays

Are you concerned that your child isn’t speaking as clearly as it seems he should be by the age he is? The physical ability to speak clearly, or articulate, develops at different rates in different children, but some children do end up lagging behind for various reasons.

Children take a while to pronounce words correctly when they’re learning to talk – they develop the physical capacity to produce all the necessary sounds over time. Usually they gain that physical capacity at similar ages, so speech development has milestones just as physical development does.

Children who lag significantly behind other children their age in being able to pronounce clear speech sounds are said to have articulation disorders. A child may substitute one sound for another, leave out a sound, or add or change a sound. Common speech errors, such as substituting a “w” sound for an “r” sound (“wabbit”), become speech disorders when they last beyond a certain age.

Errors in articulation of speech sounds can come from a variety of causes, including physical, developmental, neurological, or genetic syndromes. However, most often, we never know the cause. Whatever the cause, treatment can help.

Articulation is the process by which sounds, syllables, and words are formed when your tongue, jaw, teeth, lips, and palate alter the air stream coming from the vocal folds. When an individual cannot produce or distort an age-expected sound(s), it draws attention away from the speaker’s message. Articulation disorders are motoric errors that can occur among people of any age; however, they are most common in children whose articulators have not developed properly which is why early speech therapy intervention is critical to a child’s speech development.

Phonological Delay

A Phonological delay is a simplification of the sound system that also affects intelligibility. A phonological disorder is a child's difficulty at their phonemic level (in their brain). This "phonemic level" is sometimes referred to as "the linguistic level" or "a cognitive level".Children with phonological process problems demonstrate difficulty in acquiring a phonological system; involving organizing the patterns of sounds in the brain and the output, not necessarily in the motor production of the sounds like Articulation errors. Typically, the child has difficulty organizing their speech sounds into a system of sound patterns called phonemic patterns. The phonological or phonemic level is the brainwork that organizes the speech sounds into the sound patterns to be produced. The sounds need to contrast with each other, or be distinct from one another, so that we can make sense when we talk.

Potential Examples of Articulation and Phonological delays:

• Hard to understand the child when context is not known

• Child has more than one sound in error (i.e., w for r, w for l, lisp for s etc.)

• Deleting one or more sounds at the beginning of words (i.e., sat = at).

• Child is deleting many sounds at the end of words decreasing intelligibility.

*Important Note:  A typical 3-5 y/o child should be able to articulate 90% of their speech so that anyone in their environment can understand them including strangers.