Causes and Therapy of Common Articulation Defects in School Children

Abstract

Articulation disorders can be either functional or organic. Functional disorder is however viewed in this paper as a disorder due to defective learning for the speaking act in one form or another. Types of functional disorder include substitution, omission, distortion or addition of phonemes of speech sound. Causes of functional articulation disorders are generally due to faulty learning from a poor speech model. To correct the problem, the child can be exposed to our therapeutic approaches, namely: traditional, behavioural, linguistic and modeling. It is suggested that parents/care takers of children should show good speech and be concerned when articulation problems occur.