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SPEECH SOUNDS ERRORS: ARTICULATORY-PHONOLOGICAL DISORDERS

Clear communication with others can be disrupted by one or more variables that can make a child misunderstood by members of his speech community. In some cases, this leads to only minor problems and in other cases, children having these difficulties may experience emotional, social and even academic difficulties related to disturbed speech patterns.

Disturbed speech patterns can occur secondary to articulation and phonological disorders. Articulation disorders refer to speech motor-control problems whereas the term phonological disorders is usually used to describe an underlying difficulty with the phonological aspect of language knowledge displayed by a highly unintelligible child. Because many children often have a combination of motor and language knowledge difficulty, many professionals use the term articulatory-phonological disorders while referring to these disorders.

Speech sounds (phonemes) can be broadly classified into vowels (such as /a/, i/, /u/) and consonants (such as /b/, s/, and /k/). There are many theories for the typical development of articulatory and phonological skills. These theories include; behavioral theory, structural theory, biological theory, cognitive theory, natural phonology theory, and generative phonology theory.

Children having difficulties with speech sounds production may omit sounds or parts of words while speaking (omission), may substitute one sound for another (substitution), may misarrange sounds within words (sound reversals / metathesis) or may add speech sounds that do not originally belong to the word they are producing (epenthesis / sound insertion). However, phonological skills encompass, not only production but also perception (awareness). Therefore, some children have difficulties with production per se whereas others may show difficulties with both awareness as well as production.

Sometimes children do not develop articulatory-phonological skills normally. Such children are referred to as having an articulatory-phonological disorder. These disorders can be broadly classified into two categories; functional or organic. In the functional type, there is no observable organic or structural cause that can account for the occurrence of such errors. On the other hand, the organic type occurs secondary to physical damage to the peripheral or central nervous system or the oral structures, or all of these.

Assessing these disorders can be done by a combination of formal / standardized tests along with speech samples (conversational as well as evoked) and stimulability assessment. Treatment can be artificially dichotomized into motor approaches and cognitive-linguistic approaches. Often a combination of both is used in therapy.