What are Articulation and Phonological Disorders?
An articulation disorder is considered a motor speech disorder. He or she has difficulty saying particular consonants and/or vowels sounds. For example, saying “wabbit” instead of “rabbit.”
A phonological disorder is characterized by atypical speech patterns that are present in a child’s conversational speech that persist beyond the typical age development. Errors occur at the linguistic, or phonemic, level.
How do I know if my child has an articulation disorder?
Speech sound errors persist beyond what is developmentally appropriate.
A child is mild to moderately unintelligible.
Children with an articulation disorder typically respond well to a traditional articulation therapy approach where one sound is targeted at a time.
How do I know if my child has a phonological disorder?
Speech sound errors present in patterns, which are called phonological processes.
The speech patterns persist beyond what is developmentally appropriate.
Usually a child is HIGHLY unintelligible due to the patterns that are simplifying adult speech.
Therapy may target the phonological processes, as opposed to targeting each error sound by sound as you would in a traditional articulation approach. This treatment approach improves speech intelligibility at a faster rate.