Speech sound disorders (SSD) is a term used to describe any difficulty with perception, motor production, or phonological representation of speech sounds or segments.
Approximately 8-9% of young children exhibit a speech sound disorder. Speech sound disorders can be caused by an underlying motor, neurological, structural, and/or sensory abnormality, although many times, speech sound disorders do not have a known cause.
Articulation disorder describes errors such as distortions and substitutions that involve a deficit in motor production of individual speech sounds. For example, a child may produce a distorted “s” sound by interdentalizing or lateralizing the production. Or a child may have a distorted or weak “r” or “l” production (“wabbit” for “rabbit” OR “ca” for “car”).
Phonological impairments involve a predictable, rule-based error pattern that affect many sounds and groups of sounds. Phonological disorders are not caused by deficits to the motor system, but rather deficits to the linguistic system. For example, a child may substitute the front sounds “t” and “d” for the back sounds “k” and “g” as in “tat” for “cat” and “doe” for “go”. Other examples of a phonological impairment would be deleting final consonants (“bye” for “bite”), stopping of fricatives (“tun” for “sun”) or consonant cluster reduction (“top” for “stop”).
Speech-language pathologists screen, assess, diagnose, and treat individuals with speech sound disorders. Our role also includes:
