Common speech disorders in children

As children begin to speak and learn language, there may be a variety of disorders or conditions that could make this difficult for them. It’s important to familiarize yourself with some of the more common ones, so you know what to expect or what kind of action to take. Here is a guide to some of the most common speech disorders in children.

• Childhood Apraxia of Speech: This is a motor speech disorder in which the brain has difficulty planning and sequencing the movement of the articulators, and may result in difficulty producing sounds, syllables, and words. The child may be able to internally process what she meant, but may have difficulty physically coordinating movements to produce speech.

• Stuttering – Stuttering is quite common, but it can vary greatly in terms of severity. An assessment of an individual’s stuttering pattern would take into account family history, comorbid speech or language disorders, the presence of avoidance behaviors or secondary behaviors (eg, grimacing, blinking), assessment of the stuttering nature of the speaker’s lack of fluency and the speaker’s own opinions. of his stuttering and how it affects his life.

• Receptive-Expressive Language Impairment: An expressive language disorder is related to problems with a child getting their message across to others, while a receptive disorder is related to problems understanding an incoming message. Together, a mixed receptive-expressive language disorder would have symptoms of both conditions.

• Language-Based Learning Disabilities: This refers to a potentially wide variety of different conditions, which hinder a child’s ability with age-appropriate reading, spelling, and writing. Because of the relationship between spoken and written language, children with language-based learning disabilities may also have challenges with spoken language.

• Phonological Disorder: A Phonological Disorder is a condition that affects a person’s ability to discriminate and produce patterns of sounds. This means that whole types of sounds can be omitted or replaced with other whole types of sounds, that is, replacing hard /k/ sounds with /t/ sounds, even though the child can physically produce the /k/ and /t sounds. / sounds in isolation.

• Articulation disorder: An articulation disorder is a type of speech sound disorder, which is related to problems producing speech sounds. As such, certain sounds can be incorrectly substituted or omitted, or even added to words.

This is by no means a complete collection of speech disorders in children, but it includes a number of common conditions. Hopefully, you were able to gain a new perspective on terminology that you may have heard of before, but were unaware of what the real implications were.

If your child has been diagnosed with a speech disorder, or if you think they may have one, it is important to receive an evaluation by a certified pediatric speech pathologist.