What Is a Phonological Disorder? Signs, Reading Challenges & Treatment Strategies

Today we’re going to focus on Phonological Disorders and how they can impact our kiddos’ reading and spelling. Not everyone knows what a phonological disorder is, and, even if you are aware, you don’t always realize the impact that it can have on reading and spelling.

What Is a Phonological Disorder?

A phonological disorder is a type of speech sound disorder where children have difficulty correctly saying their speech sounds. In other words, they’re not saying their sounds correctly, but they’re saying them in predictable ways that follow patterns known as phonological processes.

Examples of Phonological Processes

Here are some examples of common phonological processes:

• Process of Stopping: Saying “shoe” as “too”
• Process of Cluster Simplification or Reduction: Saying “drum” as ‘“dum”
• Process of Backing: Saying “tip” as “kip”
• Process of Voicing: Saying “pick” as “big”
• Process of Syllable Reduction: Saying “banana” as “nana”

Now - major note!!! - all kids will say sounds and words in error as they’re learning to talk. I usually tell parents it’s because they’re making things easier for themselves as they learn what they’re supposed to be doing with their mouth, tongue, throat, and lungs. We expect to see some of these as kids are getting things sorted out in their mind (and, frankly, it’s adorable when a kid calls spaghetti, “sketti”).

When Should You Be Concerned?

While all children make speech errors as they learn to talk, certain red flags indicate a phonological disorder:

• When the errors persist beyond the expected age range.
• When the speech errors make it difficult for unfamiliar listeners (such as a grandparent or a stranger) to understand the child past the age of three.

Understanding the Impact of Phonological Disorders

Small, but important sidebar: It’s important to know that not all phonological processes are created equal. We don’t need to dive into the specifics, but certain changes in speech (like eliminating the first sound in a word) is much more attention-grabbing to me as a speech pathologist than a kid calling a shoe a “too,” but otherwise learning his “sh” sound in other “sh” words.

Second sidebar: This is where it’s hard to capture everything in a blog. All kids are different, and a lot of our kiddos have their own little one-offs that aren’t always easy for a parent to decide if they should be concerned. If you’re reading through this and are wondering, “should I be concerned?” – just message us – if we can’t help, we can point you in the direction of someone who can.

How Phonological Disorders Affect Reading and Spelling

Now that we have this small bit of new information, let’s jump into why we care about phonological disorders and learning to read with a bit of background on me... In grad school, I was essentially taught that most kids with sounds in errors have straight articulation disorders. Think of kids calling rabbits “wabbits” or teachers “teachuhs.”

The teaching I received was that kiddos with intense phonological disorders were few and far between. (Think of these as your kids that you cannot understand what they’re saying because they’re dropping syllables, changing sounds, or not saying every sound in a word.)

However, as someone obsessed with how kids learn to read and spell, I’d argue that anytime a kiddo isn’t saying their sounds right, we need to just assume it’s a phonological disorder and treat it that way.

The Connection Between Speech and Literacy

Here’s why: The same system we use for learning to listen and speak, is the same system we will later use to read and write. We know that kiddos who have a lot of sounds in error are at a higher risk of difficulty with phonological awareness* tasks (and we can then assume it will bleed into their reading and spelling), BUT kiddos with just a single sound in error can also see it impact their spelling.

(*Phonological awareness is simply being aware of the sounds in spoken language and then being able to recognize and manipulate and/or play them. We deeply need this when learning to read and spell.)

Why Phonological Errors Matter

Why do I no longer think speech sound errors are “just artic?” Because how did your kid’s amazing brain develop the ability to produce these complex speech sounds just by listening, but didn’t notice that we say “chair” instead of “share”? If they figured alllll these other sounds out, but didn’t notice a difference between “ch” and “sh,” it’s not “just articulation” – it’s something in the phonological processing component of the brain that didn’t get plugged in to the right spot. (This is just one example of an error we may hear in a kid’s speech.)

Are you starting to see how this can then impact reading and spelling?

If you think the word “chair” is pronounce “share,” it’s going to become tricky when you’re learning about the digraphs “sh” and “ch.” If this student was able to discriminate (which just means tell the difference) between all the sounds in order to eventually start saying red instead of “wed” (along with learning all their other sounds), what was it about this kiddo’s specific brain that was and is struggling to tell the difference between “sh” and “ch?”

When this happens, it is phonological in nature.

When it’s phonological in nature, I start to worry about reading and spelling because, again, it’s the same system within the brain.

To make things more complicated, there’s nothing natural or easy about reading and writing. It’s an advance human idea that was laid upon our brains. Our brains were not wired and built to naturally acquire the ability to read and spell the way we naturally can acquire language.

We expect most kids to learn how to correctly say all their speech sounds without help. If they struggled to do that – the natural part – we can image how complex it can become when we then start to ask them to use that part of their brain to learn and apply something that was not natural (reading and writing).

The Challenge of Learning to Read and Write

Learning to read and write is laborious and intensive when done right and part of the massive problem we have as an education system is our inability to even do it kind of right.

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How the Education System Fails Kids with Phonological Disorders

Our kids with phonological struggles aren’t falling into an education system that is built to support them even on a good day.

Here’s what I mean.

If we assume that other speech pathologists were trained the way I was – taught to assume that the sounds we hear in error just need to be fixed on “the outside,” meaning we just need to get the kid to say the sound the right way, we’re missing the inside part. (And I would argue the inside part is infinitely more important, especially considering what we’re about to ask it to do: read and write.)

What we instead end up with are a bunch of kids who are suddenly saying their sounds correctly, but are struggling to read and write. The “best” (being relative) outcome here is that speech therapy fixed their production, but then we randomly see them write a “w” for “r” while spelling a few years down the road – a major clue that, oops, that wasn’t just saying the sound wrong.

This is where presuming the errors we hear are phonological in nature protects our kids. If, as their speech pathologist, I’m assuming it’s a phonological disorder, it means I’m tackling it differently.

I’m not just drilling and killing them with repeating words with their target sound to fix how they’re saying it. I’m working on phonological awareness, their ability to discriminate between sounds, their ability to recognize sounds in isolation, and I – 100% of the time – work on pairing everything with a written word to work on reading.

So, conversely, what if it was “just articulation?” We certainly didn’t hurt them by adding in extra foundational skills that they can then apply to reading and writing. Because of that, when qualified speech pathologists assume it is phonological in nature, we’ve protected them and perhaps routed a new neural pathway to help them when they start really digging into reading and writing.

But how does this impact reading? At a high level glance through this blog so far, you now know why we care about phonological disorders: a kiddo who struggles to produce their sounds correctly in speech, is likely going to have a harder time when learning to read and write.

Here’s how and why…

Learning to read and write is not simple, mostly because (again) there’s nothing natural about it, so before we even begin to start thinking about reading and writing, we want our kids to have strong phonological awareness skills.

So what does that mean? Here are a few examples… We want our kids rhyming, counting syllables, breaking words apart into their sounds, and clapping out words in sentences, just to name a few.

We know that our kiddos with phonological disorders (and those who only produce one sound incorrectly) are more likely to struggle with these skills. We know that strong phonological awareness skills are associated with better reading outcomes, meaning kids who do this naturally and easily are less likely to become struggling readers. It shows us that they have a basic and developing understanding about the relationships of sounds in words, which is very necessary when learning to read and spell.

Now I have a curve ball for you.

It’s important to note that not all kids who produce speech sounds in error have difficulty with phonological processing (our actual “just artic kids”), but it’s equally important to remember that you don’t have to say sounds incorrectly to struggle with phonological processing either.

Wait, what?

Exactly.

We have a whole group of kids who often feel the “wait, what?” when interacting with words and sounds. These are our kiddos who have phonological processing disorders. A phonological processing disorder is when students have trouble organizing the pattern of sounds within their brain.

Phonological Processing Disorders vs. Speech Sound Disorders

Students with a phonological processing disorder may or may not have trouble accurately producing their speech sounds, but they do have trouble understanding and organizing their speech sounds within their brains.

In other words, sounds, syllables, and relationships between words (like rhyming, alliteration, etc) don’t feel clear. They may have a hard time connecting sounds to their letters and processing (understanding) information they’re hearing.

These difficulties very much bleed into learning to read and write, and we often times can see it in how they build their sentences while speaking and writing (think about a kid who struggles to understand when you use -ing or -ed), and it can also make it hard to learn new vocabulary words.

If it’s hard to digest and understand what you’re listening to (or eventually reading), you can see how learning a new vocabulary could become hard. It’s often challenging for them to fully comprehend all the sounds and syllables, so of course it’s then hard to remember what the word was several minutes, hours, or days later.

When we see challenges at the sound level with these kiddos, we need to remember that everything else sits on top of that: words, vocabulary, sentence structure, paragraphs, and conversations. When we have struggles at the sound level, absolutely everything else is impacted.

So what do we do about it?

What Parents Can Do

As parents, the first step should always be consulting with a qualified speech pathologist that understands the nuances between speech sound disorders and phonological disorders, including a phonological processing disorder.

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What Speech Pathologists Can Do

Each kid is unique and language development is complex. As both a speech pathologist and a parent, even I have a hard time identifying what is happening with my own kid. Outside perspectives of trained professionals exist for a reason, so look for one that can help!

But what about us speech pathologists that feel like we were missing a massive chunk of training within our graduate program? What are we supposed to do?

Great question!

We already most likely know about the Multiple Opposites Approach and Minimal Pair Contrast Therapy. These are what we learned about in grad school and were taught to use (where appropriate based on each student) with our students that very clearly have a phonological disorder.

But what about these kids where we’re ultimately left wondering, “what in the world should I do?” Excellent question! As someone who’s danced around the literacy realm for the past five years, this is what I have found most helpful.

We want to build strong phonological awareness skills. So what’s that look like? We want our little bitties rhyming, sorting sounds, clapping out syllables, and learning to identify the sounds they’re hearing at the beginning, middle, or end of a word.

As our students get a little older (or if they’re already doing everything mentioned above), we can start focusing more on blending sounds to make words, and playing around with the sounds they’re hearing in words. We can do this with word games like “If I say ‘pop,’ but change the first sound to /k/, what word do I have? We also always want to be building words using tiles or other manipulatives.

Another thing I’ve found to be incredibly helping is learning the six syllable types and pair all your production targets with a written word. We know these kids are more likely to struggle with reading and spelling, but if we understand the syllable types and can be incorporate additional explicit teaching of the concepts while targeting how to say our sounds, it will help tremendously.

Here’s an example I’d use if I kiddo is using cluster reduction… I would present the word “frog” on tiles showing each sound. We would talk about how frog has four sounds and two of them blend together at the beginning. I would also casually mention how it’s a closed syllable so the “o” will say it’s short “aw” sound. From there, we could tap out the individual sounds in the word before blending it all together.

Final Thoughts

A final recommendation would be to learn what letters and groups of letter can/will say, and learn about prefixes and suffixes. There’s a lot to know about the Science of Reading that can feel overwhelming. As an SLP, knowing what letters say by themselves or within syllables, plus being able to identify and teach kids about prefixes and suffixes, will go a long way toward helping them develop their literacy skills. It’s a good first step for you to take!

This all can feel very overwhelming! If you are a parent or a speech pathologist that feels like more resources would be helpful, check out our resource page. LD Expert Parent's Guide to Reading and Spelling Homework helps both parents and SLPs who are beginning to explore the Science of Reading and how our kids with phonological disorders could benefit from our expertise.