Common speech disorders in children

As children begin to speak and learn language, there can be a variety of disorders or conditions that could get in the way. It’s important to familiarize yourself with some of the most common, 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 articulators and can result in difficulty producing sounds, syllables, and words. The child may be able to internally process what he wanted to say, 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, presence of avoidant or secondary behaviors (e.g., grimacing, blinking), assessment of the nature of the speaker’s disfluencies and the speaker’s own opinions. of your stuttering and how it affects your 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. Taken together, a mixed receptive-expressive language disorder would have symptoms of both conditions.

• Language-based learning disabilities: This refers to a potentially wide range of different conditions, which hinder a child’s ability to read, spell, and write appropriate for their age. Because of the relationship between spoken and written language, children with language-based learning disabilities can also present challenges with spoken language.

• Phonological disorder: A phonological disorder is a condition that affects a person’s ability to discriminate and produce sound patterns. That means that entire types of sounds can be omitted or replaced with other complete types of sounds, that is, replace loud / k / sounds with / t / sounds, even though the child can physically produce the / k / and / t / sounds sounds in isolation.

• Joint disorder: A joint disorder is a type of speech and 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 does include a number of common conditions. Hopefully, you were able to get a fresh perspective on terminology that you may have heard of before, but didn’t know what the real implications were.

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