What is it?

As children learn to speak, it is normal for them to have difficulties producing certain sounds, which can make it harder for them to be understood at times. Speech sounds develop over time, with certain ones being learnt earlier than others. By the age of 8, most children will be able to produce all speech sounds.

Some children may have a speech sound delay or disorder. This means that they find it more difficult to learn to say certain sounds or it may take them longer to learn how to produce certain words. This can make it harder to understand what your child is trying to say.

There are two main speech sound disorders:

Articulation disorder

When your child has a problem with making certain sound(s), such as “sh.” Your child may drop, add, distort or swap certain sounds.

Phonological disorder

When your child substitutes a sound for another sound (e.g. saying ‘r’ instead of ‘w’). Some children may even replace several sounds for one sound (e.g. saying ‘t’ instead of ‘s’, ‘sh’ and ‘ch’). This can also include not being able to pronounce certain sounds

How does it affect children?

If your child had speech sound difficulties you may observe your child:

• Leaving off sounds from words (example: saying “at” or “ba” instead of “bat”).
• Adding sounds to words (example: saying “puhlay” instead of “play”).
• Distorting sounds in words (example: saying “thith” instead of “this”).
• Swapping sounds in words (example: saying “wadio” instead of “radio”).
• Saying only 1 syllable in a word (example: “bay” instead of “baby”).
• Simplifying a word by repeating 2 syllables (example: “baba” instead of “bottle”).
• Changing certain consonant sounds (example: “tat” instead of “cat”).

Several of these features are normal at certain ages. Visit our developmental timeline to identify if their errors would be expected for their age.

Causes of Speech Sound Difficulties

Often, a speech sound delay or disorder has no known cause. But some speech sound errors may be caused by:

• Brain injury.
• Problems with hearing or hearing loss, such as past ear infections.
• Physical problems that affect speech, such cleft palate or cleft lip.
• Disorders affecting the nerves involved in speech.

Speech and Language difficulties are not caused by bilingualism, but it is important to be aware than some sound changes may be part of their natural accent.