Based in Betsy, Illinois, Elizabeth Lowery is active with the American Speech & Hearing Association and owns the Chicago private practice Little You, Inc. One of Elizabeth Lowery’s areas of extensive knowledge is children’s phonology and articulation disorders.

Both phonology and articulation disorders have to do with the way sounds are produced, with the latter involving specific speech sounds (for example, an “s” pronounced with a lisping “th”). In other cases, the articulation disorder may involve a sound that the child is unable to make, such as when “rabbit” is pronounced “wabbit.”

By contrast, phonological disorders involve the pattern in which a child uses sounds to make up words. The sounds are formed correctly, but how they are used is incorrect, such as when someone correctly pronounces the “k” in “kite” but leaves out the “k” in “like” and instead says “lie.”

These issues are not uncommon, with a National Center for Health Statistics survey indicating that nearly half of children from age 3 to 10 possess speech sound problems. Unfortunately, speech sound disorders at an early age are associated with reading disorders and poor literacy outcomes, which makes it essential to address them as they occur.

There are a number of accepted therapies for speech sound disorders, including articulation approaches, which target sound deviations one by one in order to teach proper delivery of the target sound. Phonological/language-based approaches target several sounds in which similar error patterns exist. They may be used when helping children internalize rules and generalize them within a broader pattern, such as final consonant deletion.