← Return to list of services

Articulation and Phonology

Articulation and Phonological disorders are common speech problems for children.  They occur when a child has difficulty producing the sounds and/or sound patterns in their native language.  Children may have difficulty knowing how to move the parts of the mouth correctly to make the sounds they want to.  They may also substitute one sound for another.  Sometimes sound errors follow patterns where groups of sounds are produced incorrectly in predictable ways.  In addition, children may not hear the differences between the sounds they use and the ones that they are suppose to be using.

Treatment for articulation and phonological disorders consists of targeting a particular sound in different positions of words.  Your therapist might focus on "s" or "L" for example.  Therapy will work on a variety of skills including:

-Helping the child know how to say the sound patterns correctly

-Helping the child learn what parts of the mouth to move for the sound. 

-Hearing the differences between the correct sounds and incorrect sounds

-Production of sounds in different parts of words (initial, medial, final positions)

-Encouraging self correction through cues and awareness

- Homework may be given that is loaded with the key sounds in order to target one sound or sound pattern and will have words with these sounds in different positions. 

It is common for children to need to work on more than one sound in the course of treatment.

In severe cases, phonological disorders can effect so many sounds and have so many layers of rules being used that the child is very unintelligible and only using a few sounds.  This can sometimes look like childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and it can be very difficult to differentiate the two.  Often during the course of treatment a child who initially looks like they might have CAS will make enough progress that the therapist can distinguish much better that the underlying problem is a phonological disorder.