Children with Atypical Speech

Most speech impairments appear as misarticulating, delayed articulation, or disfluency.  Stuttering is the most common type of dysfluency.  For example, after the age of four a child will say (I want...I want my pillow.)  Treatment for stuttering includes building a repertoire of some reliable fluent sentences and modifying the stutter by learning to avoid responses to fear of stutter incident and moving through the stuttering moments.  There are other rare atypical speech developments such as cleft palate which is caused by underdeveloped facial structures. A large percent of the speech impaired population have functional articulation disorders.  They will have difficulties with consonant clusters among other things.  They are treated through direct instruction of tongue placement/movement and lip shape.

Next we will look at children with hearing impairments.
Resources:

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association

National Institutes of Health

References:

Griffin, P. (2012). Class 4 Phonology Speech Hearing. [PowerPoint Slides] Retrieved online.