Speech Therapy for
Phonological Disorders

Kid's Phonological Disorders & Speech Sound Errors

 Having A LOT of Trouble Understanding Your Kid? Do you get constant requests to translate what they said to others? Speech Sound errors that are distractible to the listener can be treated with Speech Therapy. Intelligibility is the measure of how easily understood the child is to listeners. Often, children with poor intelligibility, and multiple speech sound errors that follow a pattern may actually have a Phonological Disorder.  A phonological disorder is a form of speech disorder in which there is difficulty organizing the patterns of sounds in the brain which results in an inability to correctly form the sounds of words. For example, this results in a child who may delete one or more sounds at the beginning of words (like “at” instead of “sat”), or use a misplaced sound as a substitute for another, such as "tat" for "cat", or have deficits in syllable structure.  Phonological Disorders must be treated by a speech language pathologist, and will not correct with time. Without treatment, Children with Phonological disorders are more likely to experience difficulty with reading, decoding of words and overall literacy deficits.

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According to this study: "children showing disordered speech errors are likely to have deficits in the way that they represent the phonology of known words, and are at high risk of reading problems because phonological awareness skills are compromised." 

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 According to the American Speech Language Hearing Association (ASHA), children with speech difficulties are more likely to be targets of bullying. Our program also focuses on improving the child's communicative confidence while correcting errored speech. Sometimes, what parents think is a simple lisp or set of articulation errors can actually be a Phonological Disorder. This requires differential evaluation by the speech therapist, and a different treatment method.