Articulation & Phonology
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Articulation & Phonology
Articulation is the process by which sounds, syllables, and words are formed when your teeth, jaw, tongue, lips, and palate change the air stream coming from the vocal folds.
A person has an articulation problem when he or she produces sounds, syllables. or words in a manner that listeners do not understand what is being said or pay more attention to the way the words sound than to what they mean. Most errors fall into one of three categories- omissions, substitutions, or distortions. An example of an omission is "at" for "cat" or "ip" for "ship." An example of a substitution is the use of "w" for "r." which makes "rabbit" sound like "wabbit," or the substitution of "th" for "s" so that "silly" is pronounced "thilly." When the sound is said inaccurately, but sounds something like the anticipated sound, it is called a distortion.
Phonemes (sounds) are learned in an orderly sequence. The table below shows the phonemes and ages at which most children will acquire those sounds. Remember this is general guideline; children are as individual as snowflakes and may not follow the time frame given.
Age of Phoneme Development
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Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used. It is the system we use to formulate sounds in words. When children make phonological errors, they generally follow a pattern. It is not necessarily that they cannot make a sound, but rather that they have developed a pattern of using an incorrect sound (often one that is easier for them to make) to replace a sound that they haven't quite mastered. An example of this would be "tat" for cat, "tookie" for cookie, or "tite" for "kite". The child uses a /t/ to replace the /k/ in all words. Another common phonological process is that the child will simply drop the beginning or ending consonant sounds saying "da" for dad or "ju bo" for juice box. ALL children use phonological processes as they acquire speech. The problem arises when they retain those processes even after they learn to produce the appropriate sounds.
From: "Questions and Answers About Articulation." Retrieved 6/05/06 from American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Web Site: www.asha.org.
