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Developmental Phonological Disorders: A Practical Guide for Families and Teachers

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Developmental Phonological Disorders is a slim handbook encouraging the understanding of parents of the theory and practice of phonological speech disorders. It provides a muli-modal treatment plan demonstrated to help preschool and elementary age children produce correct and understandable speech, which parents and speech therapists can implement together.

The science of speech sounds, especially the theory and history of sound changes, is known as phonology. Developmental phonological disorders occur when sound patterns of speech are disrupted to the point that children can not be understood as well as expected for a given age. Generally it can be diagnosed by the time children are four years old.

Therapy is designed to accelerate the child's phonological development, which is slower in children with this disorder. The therapist systematically helps the child to learn the different speech sounds and to organize these sounds into language through a series of excercises and games. Caroline Bowen believes that the input of the parents is essential to this process. Developmental Phonological Disorders provides this information for parents so that they understand what the speech pathologist is doing and can take an important role in teaching, correcting and modeling for their child.

As children learn to talk, it has been discovered that there is actually a pattern of errors which children make (now thought of as developmental delays rather than errors) and that awareness of these patterns can be used to assist your child to clearer speech. In Developmental Phonological Disorders, Caroline Bowen describes the developmental schedule for the acquistion by children of the various sounds used in language. She also provides a detailed description of the categories and labels for the sounds and for their corresponding errors. Examples of these phonological speech difficulties might be pronouncing "telephone" as "telfone" (weak syllable deletion) or pronouncing "leg" as "yeg" (gliding of liquids).

Developmental Phonological Disorders describes a multi-modal plan for teaching the language of sounds through games and practice. This involves "bombarding" children with correct sounds, practice with sounds and words, allowing children to hear speech errors and corrected speech, and correction in a playful and systematic manner. Parents can work effectively with the speech therapist and their child if they understand the terms, theory and treatment approach. While she feels that not helping the child to better speech can have negative consequences (both socially and for learning now and in the future), parents will be encouraged to find Caroline Bowen is very optimistic about the success of treatment of phonological disorders. This book will enable parents to more effectively work with their speech therapist in practicing effective speech improvement at home and perhaps even in suggestions for their therapists work with their child.