Phonological disorder and lexical development: two case studies

Abstract

Two children aged 10 and 11 years with speech and literacy difficulties are presented to illustrate the need to differentiate PHONOLOGICAL DISORDER in a linguistic sense from PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSING DISORDER in a cognitive sense. Although both children presented with a similar general pattern in their speech and literacy development, there were clear differences between them in terms of underlying phonological processing skills: one child had more difficulties with input tasks, while the other's persisting articulatory difficulties particularly affected her performance on output tasks. The children's lexical development and organization is discussed with reference to these different phonological processing profiles. When assessing such children for the purposes of planning remediation programmes, it is important to identify the underlying phonological processing skills as well as describing the child's speech difficulties, since it is the interplay of these speech and processing skills which determines the course of a child's lexical and literacy development.