Speech Therapy for Phonology

Phonology is an aspect of speech that involves rules for sequencing sounds. While articulation disorders produce speech errors, phonological disorders result in predictable, rule-based errors. Yes, there are unwritten rules for how we pattern our speech sounds! And there’s even a name for it. Each language has a variety of speech sound rules referred to as phonemes. For example, a phoneme rule in the English language has the /ng/ sound always occurring at the end of a word, as in “thing.”

Children develop speech skills by listening to and imitating adults around them. Some children have difficulty producing all the sounds they hear. To overcome this, the child’s brain creates shortcuts to simplify communication and make their words easier to speak. Or so it seems. Often, these shortcuts break the rules of speech sound sequencing.

For example, some sounds that are produced in the back of the mouth, such as /k/ and /g/, are challenging for kids to say. Children will often simplify the speech process by instead producing the sounds in the front of the mouth. This phonology error is known as fronting in speech therapy terms. You can practice this using the word “cookie.” Go for it! Say “cookie” out loud. Notice that the two /k/ sounds are produced at the back of your mouth. Children who struggle with phonology might pronounce “cookie” as“tootie,” by substituting the more easily produced /t/ sound.

Another example of a phonological rule error is final consonant deletion, as in the case of “dog” being spoken as “dah” and “cat” as “ca.” Final consonant deletion and fronting rule-based errors are two of the various types of phonological disorders, which also include:

Substitution—certain sounds are substituted or replaced within the wordAdditions—extra sounds are added to a wordDistortions—sounds are changed and distort the wordSyllable-level errors—a weak syllable word is deleted.