So.

The SLPing SLP’s (very own, very personal, heavily influenced by her graduate training) Definition of Articulation:

So, looking back at my definition of phonology, that…pretty much covers everything.

Basically, when I think of articulation, I think of a strictly motor or placement problem.  For example, I think of a lisp as an articulation problem. Also, if I child is still having difficulty producing sounds after around the age of five or five in a half (when phonological growth plateaus [see Shriberg & Kwiatkowski, 1994; Shriberg et al., 2994-a, -b]), I begin to see it as pretty much a motor issue.  The child has been mis-pronouncing a sound or sounds for so long that is has become a learned motor pattern.

This does affect my approach to treatment, because then I do treat initial, medial, and final position, and I do teach to sentence and/or conversation level. That’s because I am less changing a cognitive system, and more a (long-suffering) motor pattern.  Much harder to do!

(Where does that leave childhood apraxia of speech? Well, I guess that’s something to write about in the future.)

I think the importance in distinguishing articulation from phonology is how it affects treatment. Since I treat (most) my kids as having a phonology problem (how I define phonology), I only spend time teaching them the initial sound in words. (And yes, there is evidence to show that change occurs across the phonological system, by teaching certain sounds and only in initial word position, e.g., Gierut, 2001; Geirut, 1999.) It’s only when they are older and I see it as an articulation (learned motor pattern) problem, do I spend the time teaching it across positions and practicing it in sentences. Otherwise, I would feel like I’m wasting my own and my patient’s time (and insurance) by teaching all sounds, all positions, and all “levels” of production.

Advertisement