Welcome back to part three of our blog series about Articulation. Now that we know more about what articulation is compared to language, how we can assess it, now we need to figure out how we can tackle the issue.
Children use a normal process as they develop speech to simplify adult speech. This is called a “phonological processes”. When these patterns of simplification of adult speech continue past the developmental norms, we call this a phonological processes disorder. As an example, a parent could tell us something like, “my child always leaves off the end of words when speaking”, which might be typical for a very young speaker, but as they grow becomes harder and harder to understand them. There are many different types of Phonological Processes including:
- Final Consonant deletion
- The child is deleting sounds at the end of the work, so “duck” becomes “duh”.
- Cluster Reduction
- The child is eliminating one consonant when there should be two put together, so “spot” becomes “pot”.
- Syllable Reduction
- The child is eliminating one whole syllable when producing a word, so “computer” would be “puter”.
- Gliding
- The child produces /r/ as /w/, or /l/ becomes /w/ or /j/, so “rail” becomes “whale” and “lip” becomes “wip”.
- Vocalization
- The child replaces /l/, /r/, or ‘er’, with a more neutral vowel, so “computer” becomes “computa”
- Fronting
- The child takes a sound that is usually produced in the back of the mouth such as /g/ and moves it to the front of the mouth and makes a /d/, so “gate” becomes “date”
- Stopping
- The child reduces the amount of airflow that comes out of their mouth, so “knife” becomes “nipe” or “sail” becomes “tail”.
- Deaffrication
- The child continues airflow when they should put some stops into it, so “cheese” becomes “sheese” and “jar” becomes “zhar”.
- Pre-vocalic voicing
- The child adds voicing to sounds that should be voiceless, so “peach” becomes “beach”.
- Post-vocalic devoicing
- The child does add voicing to sounds that should be voiced so “bag” becomes “back”.
Have questions about these or aren’t sure how to tell if your child is making a phonological processes error? Send us your questions! Remember you can always check out our national accreditation (American Speech Language Hearing Association) ASHA webpage for more details. http://www.asha.org/public/speech/disorders/SpeechSoundDisorders/
Check back for our part four blog post on Articulation!
-Kasey-
