ABSTRACT
A phonetic and phonological analysis of spoken language provides a systematic description of the patterns observed in a sample of a person’s speech output. The defining characteristics of developmental phonological disorders explicitly exclude the identifiable presence of any organic pathology affecting the child’s speech-production system which might therefore be regarded as the ‘cause’ of the pronunciation problems. The children’s phonologies are communicatively inadequate to the requirements of their grammatical and lexical systems to signal meaning differences. This results from major restrictions in the number of contrasts the children’s phonologies are capable of encoding both segmentally and phonotactically. The chapter considers the characteristics of children with the disorders, both from the clinical and linguistic perspectives. With regard to the clinical evaluation of a child’s pronunciation patterns, Natural Process Analysis, Assessment of Phonological Processes, Phonological Analysis of Children’s Language and Phonological Assessment of Child Speech all consider, in different ways, the characteristics of disordered use of phonological processes.
