SSD Essay

Introduction When assessing children with Speech Sound Disorder (SSD) there are many different factors that need to be considered to determine the best course of treatment. An SSD is diagnosed when a child makes errors in their speech that are not typical for their age (Raitano). These errors can be articulation errors such as mispronouncing a sound or phonological errors, which is when a child replaces sounds with certain processes (Raitano). When a child makes either of these kinds of errors that can be diagnosed with an SSD (Raitano). There are many different approaches to treatment of an SSD that need to be considered by a speech language pathologist when preparing for a client. The first is whether or not to select early or late developing sounds to target in session. The second is whether to select sounds that a client is stimulable for or not stimulable for. Stimulability is a child’s ability to imitate a sound that they are not correctly producing in …show more content…
For example, some studies have shown that when teaching stimulable and non-stimulable sounds to children the treated stimulable sounds lead to the acquisition of untreated stimulable sounds whereas treated non-stimulable sounds did not lead to the acquisition of untreated non-stimulable sounds (Crosbie). This evidence suggests that treating stimulable sounds would be more effective in adding a greater amount of phonemes to a child’s repertoire. However, there is also research that suggests that the treatment of non-stimulable sounds will lead to the acquisition of stimulable sounds. This indicates that treatment of non-stimulable sounds would better lead to increasing the amount of sounds in a child’s phonetic inventory. Though, there is agreement that treating non-stimulable sounds will not lead to the child learning any other non-stimulable sounds