Speech sound disorders

Speech sound disorders

Speech sounds develop over time and therefore a child’s speech may be less clear than their peers but still fall within the wider range of normal.    

A Speech Sound Disorder is when a child continues to struggle with the pronunciation and use of certain sounds past the age at which they should have been acquired.  Under this umbrella of SSD, there are many sub-types of disorder.   

A detailed assessment by a Speech and Language Therapist enables a differential diagnosis to be reached and appropriate targets and support put in place.   

Characteristics of speech sound disorder include:  

• Unclear or unintelligible speech  
• This might be due to them not being able to say a certain sound i.e. they are not able to move or position their lip, tongue, teeth etc. to make the sound   
• Or due to having distorted sounds.  For example, lateral /s/   
• Or due to sound substitutions or omissions.  For example, using /d/ for /s/ (dock vs. sock), deleting the final sound in a word (ca vs. cat) 
• There may also be syllable level errors present whereby the child deletes a syllable from the word e.g. efint