Speech sound disorders

Speech sound disorder (SSD) is the broad term used to cover several different types of speech difficulties. A speech sound disorder involves difficulty or delay in the development and / or production of speech, including single sounds, single words or connected speech.

Our speech and language therapists can assess your child’s speech to establish the specific difficulties your child is experiencing. Our speech and language therapists can use the information from the assessment to create a therapy programme that works on improving the speech difficulties established in the assessment process.

Speech and language therapy can increase your child’s speech intelligibility by improving the speech sounds your child is struggling to produce correctly. Speech and language therapy can increase your child’s social communication with others.

A speech sound disorder refers to any difficulty or delay with speech at all levels, regardless of the origin of the difficulty. There are different types of speech disorders depending on the cause of the difficulty and the type of difficulty the child is experiencing.

Some terms used to describe a speech sound disorder includes:

Our speech and language therapists can assess your child’s speech to determine where their difficulty lies.

Depending on your child’s abilities, our speech and language therapists will assess your child’s production of individual speech sounds, single words of varying complexity and connected speech. The assessment will establish any phonological errors your child is producing. This can be done informally or through a formal assessment. The assessment process will also include an informal observation of your child’s speech.

The information established from the assessment will be used by our speech and language therapists to create an individualised therapy programme to improve the specific speech difficulties your child is experiencing.

The outcome of the assessment will:

• Identify delay or disorder.
• Identify specific difficulties with production of certain sounds.
• Identify gaps in development of speech.
• Identify phonological error patterns.
• Identify the impact of the speech sound disorder on your child’s daily activity and participation.
• Identify your child’s communicative strengths and coping mechanisms.

Assessments available for speech sound disorder include:

• South Tyneside Assessment of Phonology
• Speech assessment
• Observation

Speech and language therapy can increase your child’s intelligibility, work to eliminate deviant phonological processes and develop sounds that your child struggles to produce.

Our speech and language therapists will work with you and your child to create a therapy programme that works particularly on your child’s areas of need. Your child’s therapy programme will work on increasing speech intelligibility across all their communicative environments.

Speech and language therapy available for speech sound disorder includes:

• Speech therapy
• Attention and listening group
• Speech group

• Advice, support, training and strategies for parents, carers, teachers and other professionals
• Augmentative and Alternative Communication

Speech and language therapy can be highly beneficial for children who have a speech sound disorder. It can improve children’s ability to produce clear speech that can be understood by peers and adults, leading to increased communication skills. Benefits of speech and language therapy include:

• Increased intelligibility.
• Increase in speech sounds.
• Increase in successful communication with adults and peers.
• Increase in self esteem.
• Increased ability to create and maintain friendships.
• Better quality of life.
• Development of pre-literacy skills.

Speech and language therapy can provide exercises to increase your child’s intelligibility, making it easier for others to understand your child speech. Our speech and language therapists can provide therapy to increase production of individual sounds, reduce and remove error patterns and develop words your child is struggling with. Our speech and language therapists aim to provide a holistic therapy programme that can be worked on across all of your child’s communicative settings.

Often there is no known cause for a speech sound disorder in children, sometimes however it is a result of an underlying medical condition or diagnosis. Our speech and language therapists actively assess and treat children with:

• Otitis media (glue ear)
• Developmental verbal dyspraxia
• Dysarthria
• Cerebral palsy
• Developmental disorders e.g. autism spectrum disorder
• Genetic syndromes e.g. Down’s syndrome

Certain conditions like those mentioned above can have an impact on a child’s speech skills. Our speech and language therapists aim to increase your child’s speech intelligibility. Speech and language therapy can increase your child’s self-esteem and social inclusion in activities across the home and school setting. Our speech and language therapists aim to create a holistic therapy programme that works on increasing your child’s speech skills, whilst incorporating their motivators and strengths into the therapy programme.

If your child is struggling to produce certain speech sounds or is making errors in producing different words. Our speech and language therapists can provide an assessment and therapy to improve speech sound intelligibility, and increase their communication levels.

Our speech and language therapists will provide a comprehensive assessment and individualised therapy for speech sound disorder. If you think that your child has poor speech or speech sounds or you have been alerted to this from school then please email office@sltforkids.co.uk or call 0330 088 2298.