Have you ever listened to your child talk and wondered if their speech patterns are developmentally on track? If you’re curious to learn more about your child’s speech patterns and what’s considered typical, look no further! Children tend to speak in simplified speech sound patterns when they are learning to talk. Speech pathologists call them “phonological processes”.
A key example of this is when your toddler says “nana” for “banana”. Here they are simplifying a word by deleting the weak syllable in the word, which is completely typical until 3 years of age. Once this error persists beyond 3 years old, or varying ages depending on the specific process, a child will be diagnosed with what is known as a phonological disorder. In other words, phonological disorders are diagnosed when a child’s phonological processes continue past the age of when a majority of children have stopped using them, or when the processes vary from what’s typical.
There are several phonological processes that children utilize, however, today we will focus on two opposing patterns– fronting and backing.
Fronting is a typical and common phonological process consisting of a child using sounds produced at the front of their mouth instead of the back of their mouth. For example, the sounds /k/, /g/, or even /sh/ are made with the back of your tongue. With the fronting pattern, the child replaces these sounds with sounds produced in the front, with the tip of their tongue, such as /t/, /d/, /n/, /s/ and /z/. So, the word “cake” might be pronounced as “tate” or the word “go” might be pronounced as “do”. This pattern typically resolves around 3.5 years of age. If you notice you’re child fronting past this age, consider contacting a speech-language pathologist for further evaluation.
Backing, on the other hand, is the complete opposite of fronting. Instead of your child producing sounds with the tip of their tongue, such as /t/, /d/, /n/, /s/, and /z/, they substitute it with sounds produced at the back of their tongue, such as /k/ and /g/. For example, “tap” might be pronounced as “cap”, or “tat” might be pronounced as “kak”. Whereas fronting is a phonological process for children with both typical and atypical development, backing is actually not a typical process and is seen in those with more severe phonological delays/disorders. As advised for children who use fronting past 3.5 years of age, children who are backing should seek assistance from a speech-language pathologist.
These are just some examples of phonological processes that we see in children, though there are many more and we can analyze a child’s speech during a speech evalation we can determine if the phonological process is typical or atypical for their age and speech development.