As a child’s speech and language skills develop, they can sometimes go astray in the sense that they start to display certain error patterns in their speech, and this is when a speech pathologist may be required to help them overcome these problems. It can be the case that a child displays just a single speech error pattern or several different ones.

Speech error patterns occur when a child uses different sounds than the ones they should. These are often associated with children replacing letters or sounds with other letters or sounds on all occasions. An example would be using “W” instead of “R”, so the phrase ” red rose” becomes “wed wose”. Outlined below are more details on this and nine other speech error problems a speech pathologist can treat.

#1 – Gliding: This is the example we just gave, and as well as the letter “R” being replaced by ‘W”, it can happen with the letter “L” too. This leads to phrases like “The little lady is looking at the large dog ” pronounced, “The wittle wady is wooking at the warge dog”.

#2 – Deaffrication: Affricate sounds occur when we ‘rub’ two individual sounds together such as “T” &”SH” becoming the “CH” sound in “chair” or “D”&”ZH” becoming the “J” sound in “jump”. If deaffrication occurs it means the child is omitting the first part of the speech sounds so “chair” is pronounced “shair” and “jump” is pronounced “zhump”

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