SPEECH SOUND ERRORS /
UNCLEAR SPEECH

Speech development refers to the sounds that children say, how clear their speech is.

Language development refers to a child’s ability to understand and use words (eg. How many words they use in a sentence, vocabulary).

Speaking clearly is a skill that children develop over the first 5-7 years of their life. Your child may produce a sound incorrectly at first, but will often self-correct as they mature.

This treehouse shows the average age children learn to pronounce English consonant sounds correctly.

average age to pronounce sounds correctly tree

How much should we be able to understand a child's speech?

Speech sound errors are common among children learning to talk. These errors are a normal part of speech development and normally resolve at different ages as children learn how to coordinate the movements of their jaw, lips, and tongue. When a child is unable to self-correct a speech sound and/or is not producing sounds expected for their age, they will then require the guidance of a speech pathologist (SP) to support their speech development.

Speech sound disorders can relate to both articulation and phonological errors.

Occur when a child has difficulty with the oral placement of their tongue, lips, and jaw to produce a sound. For example: an interdental lisp occurs when the tongue protrudes between the upper and lower teeth to produce sounds such as ‘s’ and ‘z’, as opposed to elevating up to the hard palate behind the upper teeth.

As children learn to speak, they simplify adult productions of words. These are called phonological processes.

Phonological processes are patterns of sound errors that typically developing children use to simplify speech as they are learning to talk. They do this because they don’t have the ability to coordinate their lips, tongue, teeth, and jaw for clear speech. They simplify words in predictable ways until they develop the coordination required to articulate clearly. These processes are considered normal unless they persist beyond the age when most typically developing children have stopped using them. (eg. Final consonant deletion is a process whereby the final consonant sound in a word is omitted, for example a child says “bea” instead of ‘bead’. This error typically resolves by 3 years of age.).

A motor speech disorder is present when a child struggles to produce speech because of problems with motor planning or muscle tone needed to speak. There are two major types of motor speech disorders: Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) and Dysarthria.

Childhood Apraxia of Speech: difficulty getting the message from the brain to the muscles to tell them how and when to move to make sounds (ie. difficulty with motor planning, sequencing, and coordinating relevant muscles for speech production).

Dysarthria: caused by muscle weakness and/or poor control. It causes speech to become slow and slurred and is often difficult to understand. (ie. weakened muscles that result in slowness and incoordination in speech production)

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