Put simply, when a speech sound disorder is present, your child’s speech is hard to understand because they’ve either mislearned the rules for how and when to use their sounds (phonological disorder) or haven’t learned how to correctly move their mouths to make their sounds (articulation disorder).

When children do not resolve these errors by an expected age of development, they may have an articulation or phonological disorder (or both) that requires specialized treatment.

Keep reading for more details:

“Articulation” refers to how we use our “articulators” (tongue, lips, teeth, etc.) to actually make sounds that we combine into words. Categories of articulation errors include distortions (using a non-typical sound for a typical sound, like a lisp), substitutions (using one typical sound in place of another - “love” sounds like “wuv”), and omissions (leaving out a sound in the word - “ball” becomes “ba”).

“Phonology” refers to an incorrect use of sounds or a pattern of errors across words. Common examples include fronting (“kitty cat” becomes “titty tat”) and cluster reduction (“snake” becomes “nake”).

If a child is incorrectly producing their sounds past a typical age of development, and they are hard to understand by people outside their family, they can benefit from speech therapy. Evidence based intervention will utilize a treatment approach specifically matched with your child’s needs. Each session will include A) practicing targets selected to make the greatest improvements in their speech sound system and B) Review and assignment of home-practice to increase progress and generalization of skills outside the therapy room.

Speech Sound Resource Page