A clinical note on articulation disorders in children

Abstract

This is a review on 71 children with disorders of articulation, or“functional articulation disorders”seen in our speech clinic. The children were classified into two groups, group A and group B, according to the pattern of their articulation errors. Group A consisted of 32 children with articulation errors commonly found along the course of normal speech development. Group B involved 39 children showing different types of errors from those observed in normal development of speech. The observed results were summarized as follows.(1) Substitution of {t/k, d/g} and {t or t∫or∫/s, d or d _??_/dz} were typically found in group A, whereas in group B, there were various types of errors including lateral lisping type, glottal stop, nasal articulation and abnormal palatal articulation.(2) Affected sounds were more variable in group B as compared to group A. Errors for t∫, t, d, n, i, p and b were observed only in group B.(3) Spontaneous correction of the errors was obtained in some cases in group B as well as in group A for the age range of 4 to 6 years.(4) Articulation training achieved good results in both groups. However a longer time period of training was needed for group B in general, due to a greater number of errors to be corrected.(5) Correction of errors such as s/t, k/t, k/s, lateral lisping type and abnormal palatal articulation appeared to require longer time than that of other errors.(6) Application of distinctive feature analysis for the discription of articulation disorders was also discussed.