Phonological Process Center

What are phonological processes?

Phonological processes are patterns of sound errors that typically developing children use to simplify speech as they are learning to talk. They do this because they don’t have the ability to coordinate the lips, tongue, teeth, palate and jaw for clear speech. As a result they simplify complex words in predictable ways until they develop the coordination required to articulate clearly. For example, they may reduce consonant clusters to a single consonant like, “pane” for “plane” or delete the weak syllable in a word saying, “nana” for “banana.” There are many different patterns of simplifications or phonological processes.

You can refer to the Phonological Processes Chart for details.

What is a Phonological Disorder?

A phonological disorder is when phonological processes persist beyond the typical age of development and may cause a child to be unintelligible in conversational speech.

excerpt from Mommy speech therapy website

When should you be concerned about a Phonological Disorder?

1) Child is very hard to understand when context is not known.

2) Child has more than one sound in error (i.e., w for r, w for l, lisp for s etc.)

that makes the child difficult to understand.

3) Child is deleting 1 or more sounds at the beginning of words (i.e., sat = at).

4) Child is deleting many sounds at the end of words decreasing intelligibility.

5) Child has a "slushy" (mouth full of marbles) sounding /s, z/ or "sh" sound.

6) Child has atypical sound substitutions or abnormal sounding speech based on your experience.

7) A child that is deleting part of s-blends (spoon = poon) and does not have /l/, /r/, or /k/ and /g/.

excerpt from Amy Speech Language Therapy website