As children begin to speak and learn language, there may be a variety of disorders or conditions that could make it difficult for them. It’s important to become familiar with some of the more common ones, so you know what to expect or what type of action should be taken. 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 the articulators, and can result in difficulty producing sounds, syllables, and words. The child may be able to internally process what she 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, concomitant speech or language disorders, the presence of avoidance behaviors or secondary behaviors (eg, grimacing, blinking), assessment of the nature of the speaker’s lack of fluency and the speaker’s own opinions. of his stuttering and how it affects his 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. Together, a mixed receptive-expressive language disorder would have symptoms of both conditions.
• Language-Based Learning Disabilities: This refers to a potentially wide variety of different conditions, which impair a child’s ability with age-appropriate reading, spelling, and writing. Because of the relationship between spoken and written language, children with language-based learning disabilities may also have challenges with spoken language.
• Phonological disorder: A phonological disorder is a condition that affects a person’s ability to discriminate and produce sound patterns. This means that whole types of sounds can be omitted or replaced with other whole types of sounds, that is, replacing hard /k/ sounds with /t/ sounds, even though the child can physically produce the /k/ and /t sounds. / sounds in isolation.
• Articulation disorder: An articulation disorder is a type of speech sound disorder, which is related to problems producing speech sounds. As such, certain sounds may 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 gain a new perspective on terminology that you may have previously heard of, but were unaware of what the real implications were.

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